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, going through the album track by track for Mojo, called it a Thom Yorke solo guitar instrumental and thought of a gentler outtake from Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica.

This site's 2003 page on the song kept a fuller listening note from Canada's Jam!, which heard a harsh, distorted guitar trying out a few notes until they loop like tape, fingers audibly scraping down the strings and a whoosh behind it like distant traffic, and summed the whole thing up as weird.

It sits between “Dollars and Cents” and “Like Spinning Plates”, a breath before the last stretch of the record. When Chris DeVille at Stereogum went through the album for its twentieth anniversary, he put it on the list of things Amnesiac could have lived without.

never a slot of its own

It reached the stage three months after the album, at Oslo Spektrum on 9 September 2001. After Yokohama Arena on 3 October it waited 293 days, until the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 23 July 2002.

It never had a place in the set to call its own. On the first night of 2003, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, it came straight after “The National Anthem”, and at Coors Amphitheatre in Chula Vista that September 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” again, which makes it hard to say where one song stopped and the other began. After Dublin on 4 December 2003 it kept turning up the same way, as a coda behind “The National Anthem” from 2008 to 2018 (and behind “Bodysnatchers” at Lyon in 2016), and as an intro to “Bodysnatchers” in Berlin in 2025.

six votes and a trailer

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

Television liked it better, and in September 2004 this site's news desk caught it playing under a Sky One trailer for Deadwood.