Who is this Rachel and what are these Bears?
Call it chamber pop, theatrical folk, indie, dark carbaret; this seven-piece outfit who hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma is going to do anything except lull you into dreamland.
In simplest terms, Rachel Bachman is a singer-songwriter. Her voice is bountifully expressive in dynamics, inflection, and timbre. Her songs are emotionally complex with a pitch-perfect balance of humor and mystery. Her style, however, is hard to pin down.
She was born into Michigan's scene, where she roomed with Samantha Crain and played open mics hosted by Nathan Kalish, but her musical upbringing is best credited to Tulsa. It's here that her DIY ethic and vaudevillian artistry took root in a niche substratum of the town's typically country/folk music scene.
In this thriving stew of music collaboration, she found like-minded, offbeat musicians to embrace her blossoming ideas. Welcome to the stage the Better News Bears.
The Bears are Matt Magerkurth (string arrangements + cello), Olivia McGraw (violin), Jordan Hehl (upright bass), Chris Foster (piano), Nicholas Foster (drums + percussion), and Delaney Zumwalt (backing vox). Bachman writes and leads the septet with guitar and ukulele.
The gang first got together for the release of Bachman's 2018 solo album, I'm All Ives, and made their proper debut as Rachel Bachman and the Better News Bears with their 2019 single "Time Killer".
Though uncharacteristic of the "Tulsa sound," Bachman and the Bears have garnered attention through spotlight gigs in the city, including Tulsa Little Jam at the Woody Guthrie Center, BaseCamp Festival, and MisFest (as local support for Katie Herzig).
It's with these consummate bandmates that Bachman has grown her music into even more lush and esoteric skies as she continues to flourish in her career. The expert ensemble broadens her brushstrokes into swells of strings and speckled keys, and with their full-length debut as a band, their chemistry is as strong as ever.
What are the Bears up to?
In 2021, Rachel Bachman and the Better News Bears will release a new single every month, all of which belong to the long awaited album Sappy/Deadly. To top it all off, they’re planning a weekend of reunion shows in Tulsa, OK the last week of June. Like many other artists, they haven’t made music in the same room together since pre-pandemic days, and they’re beyond excited to hear live sound waves mingling together again, instead of limiting themselves to tiny videos, arranged in zoom-style on a computer screen
2021 Release Dates
(private links for press purposes only)
- Feb 10, 2021: Rose-Colored Pennies/Superunderestimated sky
- March 24, 2021: Cryptic/Immune
- April 28, 2021: Some Boy/Waiting
- June 2, 2021: Starstruck/Rotten Luck
- July 7, 2021: All for Phrases/Vourvoulos Veranda
Why are they all so Sappy/Deadly?
Sappy/Deadly is Bachman's fourth self-produced LP, so the record's complex tone is not something that was borne overnight. Like any project from the subversive songstress, it's playful and quirky yet fully dramatic. Her performance makes the lyrics jump from the song to engage the listener and help reveal what lies between the lines of her curious turns of phrase.
With the Better News Bears, Bachman creates an album that isn't experimental per se but may prove ambitious for casual audiences. It's not that she has set out to destroy sing-song cliches. It's just that her creative spirit crushes the confines of traditional songwriting. The band slips between major and minor chords with ease, regularly strays from standard time, and bends tempo to the tonal needs of the songs.
Despite its shape-shifting tendencies, however, Sappy/Deadly is held together by confident performances and melodic throughlines. Even when it's standing on a bare, timid ukulele and trailing off lyrically, the album isn't meandering, and it's certainly not introverted. Rather, it quietly mimes toward hidden points in the empty spaces for listeners to find themselves.
Sonically and lyrically, its tracklist lives in limbo, never falling into a groove for too long. It's this combination of unsettled grounds and internal restlessness that steers the album's indulgent detours into pockets of ornate truths.
Rachel Bachman and the Better News Bears aren't for everyone. Their music doesn't fit neatly into genre standards. This is music that bends and blends through a color palette akin to Van Gogh or Paul Klee. It wears its offbeat style so loudly that the beat is constantly slipping from your fingers. It only employs cliches to make surprises of them. Even in sorrow, it finds joy not in stability but in the unexpected. It takes an adventurous listener to truly appreciate the turns of musical and lyrical phrase that thrive here, a realm of sound that is, in short, unmistakably Rachel Bachman.
