It is an under-explored truism that in a relationship the thing that brings you together is the same thing that will ultimately drive you apart. Thus, we find that with the re-release for the first time on vinyl of Polar Bear’s first two albums, Dim Lit (2004) and Held On The Tips of Fingers (2005), we can scientifically observe that the things that might have turned people off about the last two of the six Polar Bear albums are part of what was so appealing about these first two albums.
Polar Bear were a mini-phenomenon; they seemed to unify all musical tribes, and were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize twice (in 2005 and 2014). The debut album Dim Lit established the dual tenor format with Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart, and is the key to understanding where the group went later. It opens on “Heavy Paws On The Purple Floor” with a wonky tonality oscillating in semitones where Seb Rochford’s kick drum is tuned and plays a note that acts as part of Tom Herbert’s climbing bassline. This is the insane level of detail that would become their undoing.
For better or worse, the Passion of Polar Bear is the movement towards the supremacy of intense technical details of production at the expense of the quality of the melodic material, with Seb’s injunctions to not practice for a more ‘spontaneous’ affect. Toward the end of the band’s decade in the sun, Seb Rochford was on a personal journey through the desert, literally: he mixed that sixth album himself in the Mojave. Dim Lit and Held were recorded, co-produced, mixed and mastered in England by Robert Harder, who has one of those CVs you have to print out as a booklet.
At times like “Your Eyes, The Sea” (on Held) they use jazz language to release an effect that isn’t jazz— rather, genreless jazz chamber music. Nothing else in the catalogue is as vulnerable (or even harrowing) as the vocal track “Snow”. The vinyl release gives acoustic elements solidity and space, and electronic elements personality and clarity. The warmth imparts a classic jazz group sound such that it would seem hard to fathom why bandleader and drummer Sebastian Rochford was referred to as the “enfant terrible” of jazz.
The focus and cohesion of the recorded tracks has an amnesiac effect: you forget how in a live situation they were often as confounding as they were compelling. When Leafcutter John completed the group from Held onwards, Seb Rochford’s modus operandi was to bring the band in line with John’s electronics in a kind of duet— a conceptual move that tended to sideline the expressive and explosive interplay of the players. He said that for the third album Polar Bear he wanted “to have the saxes not so much soloing, but more interacting with John, and it took a while for everyone to get their heads round improvising in that way.” On Held, the track “Fluffy” is a formative wrestling match between John and the band. This knotty track in particular sticks out among the strong super-melodic tunes and rich harmonic arrangements of the album generally. We find the group establishing and feeling towards their perfection of a balance between jazz traditionalism and musical progression— eclectically inspired but at this point coherently and collaboratively focused.
At points on Dim Lit there are acoustic extended techniques that would later be rendered electronically— the scratchy sound of Tom Herbert on the strings and bass neck on “Eve’s Apple” (on later albums you’d assume these sounds were made by Leafcutter John), the non-tonal utterances and squelchy mouth sounds and looping figures on “Wild Horses”, and the samples triggered by Rochford on “Underneath you can see too much” in a nod to hiphop’s fruitful partnership with jazz. The sound world of electronic delay and effects pedals that saturated the last two albums are there from the start, but here they’re making the sounds physically, illustrating the versatility of the good cop/mad cop partnership of Mark Lockheart and Pete Wareham.
The abiding memory of Polar Bear live at their peak is of Leafcutter John’s Nintendo Wii controllers and sonic manipulation of party balloons—gimmicky stuff in other hands but faultlessly integrated into the concept of the band. At this stage it didn’t overshadow the players or the playing. The journey through the albums got to the point where the horns were backgrounded in reverb over dubby rhythm tracks and their gifts felt wasted. Over the forty minutes of Held On The Tips of Fingers, you follow Rochford’s strongly directed individual conceptions but fundamentally you hear a generational marshalling of talents, a real group—one sadly missed in the decade since it dissolved into a million other projects. As at the end, so at the beginning, all along there were parallel activities, chiefly Pete Wareham’s Acoustic Ladyland with three of the same players as Polar Bear— a punkier mirror universe to Polar Bear’s expansive experimentation. This was a time when all the projects seemed to thrive off each other.
Lockheart and Rochford seem to have bonded over Duke Ellington, as observed on a later Lockheart album with Rochford, Ellington In Anticipation (whose reading of “It Don’t Mean A Thing” always cracked me up because it’s played without any swing on it). Polar Bear’s masterpiece is “Beartown”, the six-minute epic Ellingtonian punk cabaret number with an extended format including trombone, strings, and ska guitar, and still to my mind the greatest thing that has ever been recorded by anyone. It has never sounded better than on this vinyl release, peerlessly immense in scale, scope and intensity. Comparing the 2025 vinyl to the 2004-5 CD releases (originally on the Babel Label), the horns are a bit less harsh, and the bass more full—nothing radically different, but warmer and more balanced. Dim Lit is unexpectedly understated. The quartet sound is naturalistic, with discreet shadings of strings; the layered sound on Held is a touch more compressed; the drum sound doesn’t compare at all.
The only track that’s a bit doubtful sonically is the rollicking climacteric “King Of Aberdeen”, the scrappy punk rock skronk jam that goes like gangbusters but sounds comparatively thin and harsh; you start to ask yourself if it’s owing to “inner groove distortion” on vinyl but, no, the track just sounds like that: it’s punk energy live in the studio and they probably wisely decided not warm it up too much, to just leave it thrillingly hostile. This is a prestige release on gorgeous 180g vinyl with gatefold packaging. What it crucially does is reclaim Polar Bear’s inheritance and continuity with the greatest jazz traditions, including that of ribald experimentalism. It’s a reminder of the commencement of Polar Bear’s imperial phase and of a highly influential run of albums at a time when they could do no wrong.
(*) Thanks for this information to the original album producer Oliver Weindling
‘Dim Lit’ was released on vinyl on 13 June 2025; ‘Held On The Tips of Fingers’ is out on 18 July.
