Polar Bear Club:
“The Fired Hearts”
By Emma Hernandez, Photos by Wendi Shoenfeld

December 9 at The Fire in Philadelphia. Polar Bear Club was headlining and the small venue on Girard avenue was full of people waiting to watch this relatively small band from upstate New York. They had received a lot of attention for their first length album, 2008’s Sometimes Things Just Disappear. Shortly after Polar Bear Club took the stage, it became apparent that this attention was well-deserved.

Guitarist Chris Browne and vocalist Jimmy Stadt were in a band called Tamiroff, which folded in early 2005. Polar Bear Club was a result of Browne’s desire to play music that was more energetic and straightforward than his previous band.

Stadt joined in on vocals, the band recorded a demo and started playing shows. PBC went through a few member changes early on, but “this current lineup is here to stay,” Browne says. With many of its members in school or working, PBC was considered a “part-time” band. Its members still found the time to record an EP titled The Redder, The Better.

Through streams on MySpace, kids were catching on and telling their friends about them. Some people can argue that the Internet is the death of the music industry in terms of album sales, but PBC is a perfect example of how a band can benefit from promoting themselves online. Of course, there are pros and cons to this, but according to Browne, the good outweighs the bad.

“The pros are everything and the cons are nothing. Well, almost nothing,” Browne explains. “I guess it's frustrating to have the majority of people's first impression of your music be a low-quality stream on Myspace, especially given the amount of time and effort put into production and fidelity. But that's still better than people not hearing your songs at all.”

But in response to how downloading or streaming can hurt album sales, “Myspace and music downloading has been a great development for punk/hardcore/indie. Bands make way more of their money from shows and merch than from CD sales, anyway. Cry about it, Lars,” says Browne.

In 2008, the band released their first full length Sometimes Things Just Disappear. The album was extremely well-received by fans and critics, and it was named one of the 10 essential albums of the year by Alternative Press Magazine. For a band whose main focus is writing music that they can just be proud of, this came as a welcome surprise.

“We just wrote some stuff we liked, and the rest followed,” Browne explains. And it did. The band embarked on its first headlining tour in the fall of 2008. When PBC played Phillidelphia, they were greeted by eager fans who knew all the words to their songs.

The intimate atmosphere at The Fire is Browne’s favorite part of playing live shows. “There's nothing quite like a small room packed full of people singing things that mean something to them, together,” he says.

A month after that show, the band announced that they signed to Bridge Nine Records. The decision was unanimous amongst the members.

“We were really into the idea of being a kind of wild card on a label,” says Browne. “We could have gone with a safer stylistic choice or a bigger label and been a smaller priority or something, but we liked the idea of sounding different than all the other bands on the label but still being part of a community of good and respectable people that participate in music for the right reasons.”

Since signing with Bridge Nine, PBC’s schedule has been filling up quickly. Earlier this month, the band flew overseas to tour in support of The Gaslight Anthem. After returning to the states in March, they will go on tour with Have Heart and Trapped Under Ice. After that, it’s out to Seattle for a month to record a full length for Bridge Nine. Fans can expect another UK tour from May through June, then a U.S. tour over the summer. PBC went from being a part-time project to a full time band in the span of about two years, and it’s the passion they have for the music that keeps them going. As Browne puts it, “PBC is just a product of the five of us coming together and doing what we love. We do this band because it's absolutely 100 percent what we want to be doing.”