While it was a love of house music and conversations in clubs that brought Raf Daddy and Joe Goddard together to form The 2 Bears, their all encompassing hunger for music of all styles and genres has made its way further and further into the sounds that they create together.
Their second long-player “The Night Is Young” lands this week and further stretches out the musical landscape inhabited by the duo seeing them hopping around genres even within single tracks. There’s a lightness of touch present across the production throughout that makes it all feel brilliantly effortless.
The whole thing has a lovely old skool feel without wallowing in nostalgia at all and the forthcoming live shows (catch them in Glasgow on 4th November at King Tuts) should be great and see the tracks come to life in a whole new environment.
We’re what you could call animal people round these parts (apart from cats – cats are shit) so we caught up with Raf Daddy from the duo for a wee chat and instead of the usual “so how did you make the album” terrible chat we decided we’d just ask him about his favourite musical animals….
Raf Daddy’s favourite musical animals
Eek-A-Mouse
Can’t argue with this mouse, he generally does one thing but he does it so well you can’t really fault him. Some classic tunes.
Dangermouse
Another musical mouse and an absolutely amazing producer (we can forgive his work on the latest U2 album, we all gotta pay the bills) that’s turned his hand to many different styles with ease and a huge amount of critical and commercial success.
The Grey Album was a brilliant piece of work, a cracking idea that maybe came across as more of an art project than an album but the music certainly didn’t suffer because of it.
His material with Cee-Lo Green as Gnarls Barkley was huge and as soon as you heard “Crazy” it was obvious that it’d be a huge hit record.
Super Furry Animals
I used to go see these guys a lot and while a lot of acts tried to blend indie and electronic music and ended up with fairly mediocre stuff, the Furrys just carried it off no problem with relative ease by never putting the two styles too closely together.
Over the years they’ve gone through a load of different styles – from noisier punky bits to 70s rock and all in all it’s generally been good.
Gruff Rhys is of course a total genius too – a definite original.
Sugarbear
Only really one tune from these guys but it’s a total classic. Brilliant noisy post Public Enemy hip hop from the late 80s that samples Talking Heads and Lyn Collins nicely.
Crazy Frog
What can you say – some kinda twisted genius must have been behind this. When I first heard it I thought it was gonna end being revealed as the work of the KLF or someone along those lines.
Whoever made it is probably sitting on the beach on his own desert island at the moment so he must have done something right.
So there ya have it! Here’s the bears in action over at Mixmag with an hour of quality house and disco to see you off:
