Album Review: Bear Cub: Good Morning, Every Morning

I wrote my last review of a Bear Cub show in August of 2010. Since then the band have pulled up stakes and set up camp in Nashville, TN. While the band has played a handful of excellent and well attended gigs in our fair city since then, Bear Cub has been, for all intent and purposes, Nashville's adopted child, with Pittsburgh getting judge ordered visitation
 rights.

But no matter; you can take the bear out of the 3 rivers, but you can't take the 3 rivers out of the bear. One of the strongest tracks on their latest LP, Good Morning, Every Morning is a love note to the Burgh entitled "For Pittsburgh, With Love and Squalor (Lets Go Out)" where singer Jesse Hall sings about finding women, picking fights,  and doing just about everything to "make damn sure they remember us." during a night in Pittsburgh.

If I had my druthers, this song would replace Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow" as the modern anthem for the steel city. Maybe they'll even name the corner (mob) booth at Dees after the band. 

Bear Cub are an easy band to write about because they give bloggers and music journalists plenty of cliff notes about their ever evolving story line in the lyrics of almost every song. They are, if nothing else, great storytellers and their best stories currently seem to be their own. On opening track "I've Been around" Hall lays out what could be the Bear Cub manifesto as he waxes on candidly about packing up his truck to follow the dream. "I don't think that we'll be rich, but I know we won't be bored" and "if you stay on one place you'll never grow".

Each song is a mini epic is the styles Bob Dylan, John Prine, and more recently Conor Oberst. Bear Cub is able to intermingle Americana and Beatles based sing along pop in ways that would make the E Street Band take notice. And their live shows are nothing to sneeze at either. On a good night Bear Cub can bring down the house; on a great night they may save your damned soul.