Hunting Bears

one guitar, not much else

Track nine of Amnesiac runs 2:01 and has no words. It is electric guitar and synthesiser, and very little of either. Nick Kent, reviewing the album track by track for Mojo, called it a Thom Yorke solo guitar instrumental and reached for Captain Beefheart.

a gentler, less abrasive Trout Mask Replica outtake

nick kent · mojo, june 2001

The 2003 site kept a fuller listening note from Canada's Jam!: a harsh, distorted guitar picking out a few tentative notes, which turn into something like a tape loop of themselves; whooshing in the background like waves or distant traffic; fingers audibly scraping down the strings; a little electric piano underneath. Jam! summed it up in one word, and the word was “Weird.”

It sits between “Dollars and Cents” and “Like Spinning Plates”, the gap before the last two songs. Not everyone thought it had earned the space. When Chris DeVille at Stereogum went through the record for its twentieth anniversary, he put it on the list of things Amnesiac could have lived without.

sixteen nights

It reached the stage late, three months after the album, at the Parkbühne Wuhlheide in Berlin on 11 September 2001. There were five nights of it that year, the last at the Budokan in Tokyo on 2 October, and then nothing for 294 days until the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 23 July 2002.

It never had a slot of its own. On the first night of 2003, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, it came straight after “The National Anthem”. At Coors Amphitheatre in Chula Vista on 28 September 2003 it turned up in the first encore. At the Velodrom in Berlin on 13 November it was a snatch at the end of “The National Anthem”, which makes it hard to say where one song stopped.

Eight nights in 2003 and three in 2002 bring it to sixteen. The last was The Point in Dublin on 4 December 2003, and it has not been back.

votes and a trailer

The site's readers were not sentimental about it. In the January 2003 poll for favourite Amnesiac song it got six votes, second from bottom, ahead only of “Morning Bell” on three.

Television liked it better. In September 2004 the desk noted it playing under a Sky One trailer for Deadwood, the week an extract of “I Might Be Wrong” turned up in a Sky Movies advert.

When Stereogum covered the whole album for its tenth anniversary in 2011, “Hunting Bears” went to Jemvie.