Minus the Bear really meant “farewell” back in 2018. After nearly 20 years and six full-lengths and several EPs of confident, energetic indie rock, the Seattle-based band decided it was as good a time as any to walk away gracefully and on their own terms.
After a goodbye tour, including a New Orleans stop at the House of Blues, the five members played a final hometown show and parted ways to pursue other things: new music projects, old band reunions, visual art, small businesses and fatherhood. A live record of the farewell tour released in 2021 was the last news from Minus the Bear for a while.
But when Las Vegas music festival Best Friends Forever hit up the band about reuniting for its first edition in 2024, it got the wheels turning.
“We decided not to do it, but it was a really good offer,” vocalist-guitarist Jake Snider says. With guitarist Dave Knudson busy with a reunion of his mathcore band Botch, keys player Alex Rose in the U.K., bassist Cory Murchy in New Mexico and drummer Joshua Sparks in the Midwest, “the timing wasn’t quite right.”
Fall 2025 presented a much better opportunity. It’s the 20th anniversary of Minus the Bear’s watershed second album, “Menos el Oso,” and the band is now on a reunion tour that’s quickly selling out. It includes a New Orleans show at 8 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Civic Theatre.
“Dave did the Botch reunion, his hardcore band from back in the day, and seeing that made me open to the idea [of a reunion],” Snider says. It was good to know the band still had the option — and the audience — for a tour, he adds.
Minus the Bear, then with original drummer Erin Tate and keys and synth-player Matt Bayles, recorded “Menos el Oso” in the wake of a tour of Spain, their first international tour. The band had been building momentum with its debut EP and first full-length, “Highly Refined Pirates,” a sound built on Knudson’s math-rocky finger-tapping guitarwork, electro-indie atmospherics and Snider’s lyrical storytelling.
With “Menos el Oso,” the band dug into lush, new territory, incorporating quick guitar loops — programmed on a set of Line 6 DL4 guitar pedals Knudson can tap with his feet in a sweaty dance. The sampling added a glitchy rhythm to the band’s sound while more R&B and pop influences made their way into the mix.
“‘Oso’ became pretty dense pretty quickly,” Snider says. “So [I found] ways to weave in guitar parts that supported what Dave and Matt were doing at that time.”
Lyrically, Snider found inspiration in the band’s Spain tour as well as life in the Pacific Northwest, writing scenes of mid-party skinny dipping and lust, rare snowfalls, dark bar booths and looking over the Atlantic from its European coast.
“Those types of fictional songs were a hell of a lot of fun to write,” Snider says. “There are songs that are autobiographical, for sure, but stepping into a kind of more narrative headspace as a writer gives people [more].”
The lush results made many of the album’s songs staples on the band’s setlist. And tracks like “Pachuca Sunrise” — a shimmering song about capturing the feeling of a moon hanging over the Mediterranean for a far-off love — helped the band explode nationally in the mid-2000s.
Minus the Bear is playing “Menos el Oso” in full on this tour along with a few songs from other albums to cap the show. And the album has been reissued with previously unreleased demo tracks.
Many of the songs on the record have also been the band members’ favorites to play live over the years, Snider says.
“There’s a kind of tightness to the record,” he adds. “For the most part, the record really works well live. It has this direct drive to it that comes from the stage with a lot of power.”
Tickets are $53.30 via civicnola.com.
Keep up with the latest New Orleans events at calendar.gambitweekly.com.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
