Polar Bear Club – Chasing Hamburg

With Sometimes Things Just Disappear, Polar Bear Club made a name for themselves. Their post-hardcore mixed with some melodic sides, gruff vocals and intelligent lyrics captivated the ears and hearts of punk lovers around the world. It put Polar Bear Club up there as a band to hear and soon they became a band that people used as a staple for comparisons in their reviews. So the band stepped it up a bit, signed to the legendary Bride Nine Records and released their highly anticipated follow-up, Chasing Hamburg, to the masses.

The record picks up where Sometimes Things Just Disappear left off. A cohesive, thundering, aggressive onslaught of tunes that are part Hot Water Music, part Shook Ones and part Get Up Kids all mixed into one. Throw in some sing-along vocals, breakdowns, pulsing momentum and intelligent, tongue-in-cheek lyrics (You say I’ve changed from this to that / It’s funny that we haven’t met / I don’t know what’s worse / This or this getting to me/ Can’t refute on the message boards / so I’ll piss and moan to power chords) and you have a record worthy of great praise and multiple re-plays. Vocalist Jimmy Stadt leads the album with a wide range of vocal styles, going from a gruff, throaty delivery on the heavier tunes like See The Wind (the heaviest song the band has written) and Living Saints to a smoother, singing delivery on Drifting Thing, The Old Fisher Burial Ground and Chasing Hamburg. He effortlessly changes the style to match the momentum of the song; sometimes changing in mid-sentence when the need arises.

Over the repeated listens, Chasing Hamburg grows on the listener. The unstructured, punchy rhythms, the heavy bass lines, the distorted guitars and Stadt’s vocals work together seamlessly; and the mixture in tempos keep the album fresh for the entire thirty plus minutes. Despite all the positives though, there seems to be something missing in Chasing Hamburg as there are times where it just fails to truly captivate the listener. Unlike on Sometimes Things Just Disappear, nothing on Hamburg makes you stop in your tracks and go “wow.” Nothing ever fully takes over and instead it sometimes fall into the background. When you’re listening to it, patiently picking out all the high points, you see thousands; but let it play in the background as you’re doing something else and it rarely ever pulls you back into their world.

Now, Chasing Hamburg is still a good album, and one I would recommend, but it does seem to be lacking something that I hope they’ll find on their next album to make the album jump at you all the time.