The Calgary Herald: Must Listen to This Week
...Attacks the Brilliant Air by Himalayan Bear (Self Righteous Records)

This is music for ripe summer nights, relaxed and silvery like moonlight gilding the edges of shadows. You've disappeared inside an old dial radio, and an analogue crackle warms the frequencies as you slide through styles, eras and conceits--a dapple of gentle rooftop folk, chiaroscuro suggestion of great swing balladeers, cathedral organ flourishes, flamenco airs, pensive hum of a cello, gypsy accordion reel.

The Himalayan Bear (the sobriquet for Victoria-based Ryan Beattie) is a musical sensualist--much in the way Brando was a thespian sensualist--and immerses himself in the pleasures of experimentation with the same grateful abandon as an opium smoker surrendering to the dragon.

Beattie is a rare artist, transcending genre. Rather than knitting together loose references, he's synthesized a vocab of musical remembrances with his own esthetic idiosyncrasies. He pushes his language, too; over the course of three albums with main project Chet and a previous Bear effort, he's built virgin aural realm for each record. He's also possessed of an urgent and aching croon, subdued slightly here so as not to disturb the gentle ripples of acoustic guitar lapping at your heartstrings in Attacks' epic serenades. An arresting work by a songwriter with a reverence for nostalgia and narrative but the balls and soul to reach further.