Just when you thought understated was the way of yesterday along comes another album from Scotland’s premier producer of music that can hide in the cracks in the pavement. The music is, of course by Wojtek The Bear and the eleven songs are collectively known as “I Don't Think You Want To Hear This”.
Glasgow, has, and probably always will have, many pavements that feature indelible cracks and, for that matter, cracks in the concrete in the many buildings that make it up so there is plenty of space to fill with low key indie pop and melancholy fuelled melody. Certainly, the sun shines on few of the songs on “I Don't Think You Want To Hear This” but that is surely the point with Wojtek The Bear instead revealing, through song, the essential dichotomy between the grey mediocrity of our compromised existence and the spiritually enhancing Technicolor that music could perhaps bring. These are therefore songs that will have equal appeal to coffee shop residents, bus drivers and urban planners and, even if the answers to the questions that your heart or mind might ask are not actually here, the rather accurate picture painted of our place and time is one that we all can recognise.
Wojtek The Bear might well be seen as merely indie pop haunted by the ghost of a sensitive singer songwriter with a finely honed social conscience yet, underneath the mellow and fluent musical presentation, it is abundantly clear that this album is 100% full of songs that reflect our decaying society and, in that context, “I Don't Think You Want To Hear This” seems an entirely appropriate title.