Be Strong, the 2 Bears’ 2012 debut album, staked out a curious musical grey area. We live in an age teeming with musical diversity, but nevertheless, you just don’t get a lot of people making pop-house albums inspired by the credit crunch and the era of austerity, particularly while dressed, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear, in bear outfits. And yet there were Raf Rundell and Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, peering out from beneath costumes bought on the internet, singing about the raising of the state pension age over four-to-the-floor beats and defiantly retro synths – tellingly, when the 2 Bears picked their 10 favourite dance tracks for the Guardian, all but four of them came from the 1990s and 80s – or updating the theme of Chic’s Good Times by alternately prescribing hedonism as a respite from life’s ills and sorrowfully reflecting that all the drugged-up dancefloor action in the world can hold reality at bay only for so long.
The retro pop-house credit crunch concept album performed by two men in bear costumes sounds like something of a niche product. And yet Be Strong made the charts, testament to both the duo’s way with a melody and the way Rundell’s vocals – doleful and London-accented, quite at odds with the kind of uproarious diva belting you usually find atop pop-house records – worked their way under your skin. Two years on, its followup arrives, bearing far more exotic origins than its predecessor. In fairness, that wouldn’t be terribly difficult, given that Rundell claimed to have got the idea for the 2 Bears while “sitting on the sofa in my underpants on a Tuesday morning, stoned, listening to Sade’s When Am I Going to Make a Living?”, but, nevertheless, portions of The Night Is Young were recorded in South Africa while the duo were working on a project with the youth magazine Live: you can hear at least a degree of the country’s influence in Son of the Sun – which features vocalist Sbusiso – and the closing title track, driven by a guitar and synth part that seems to have a touch of mbaqanga about it.
For the most part, though, the focus of The Night Is Young remains closer to home. Emotionally at least, it’s not a million miles removed from Elbow: beset by what sound like middle-aged or at least thirtysomething concerns (Get Out dwells on how children are affected by their parents’ separation; Modern Family ruminates on the passing of carefree youth, spurred by the advent of fatherhood) and offering warm, homespun wisdom in response. It goes almost without saying that this is no less improbable subject matter for a pop-house album than the age of austerity, but The Night Is Young never feels awkward. That’s partly because Rundell and Goddard are really great songwriters: the melodies of Get Out and Angel (Touch Me) soar, the title track’s gleeful clarion-call to a night of intemperance is undercut by a mournful pedal steel guitar part, like a musical equivalent of the nagging thought that it might not be worth the ensuing hangover. And it’s partly because Rundell and Goddard are great producers. There are certainly moments here that sound almost exactly like something that could have come out 20 years ago: the fact that Angel (Touch Me) sounds like that while also sounding like something you could hear on Radio 1 next week tells you a lot about the current climate for 90s dance retro-fetishism. But more often, the duo come up with stuff that’s inventive and smart and full of neat touches: Unbuild It’s lovely homage to Patti Jo’s 70s soul classic Make Me Believe in You, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop noises that decorate Run Run, or the way Get Out transforms itself midway through, shedding its breakbeat rhythm in favour of a pounding kick drum, temporarily morphing into an entirely different song before the chorus reappears.
The album’s one stumbling block might be the duo’s insistence on once more favouring us with their sense of humour, which leads them to do things like put on funny voices (the supremely irritating See You) and, on Money Man, offering up the potentially lethal combination of a heartfelt political lyric, castigating the government for “making demons from the softest target you can find”, and a featherweight bit of cod-reggae: it’s all obviously well-meaning, but it sounds like something you’d hear at Glastonbury, in a far-flung field populated by the kind of terrible jester-hatted ning-nang-nonger who sneeringly refers to the main body of the festival as Babylon.
But that’s two tracks that grate amid an hour of music that doesn’t. For the most part, The Night Is Young manages to be simultaneously familiar and strange, commercial but emotionally weighty, grown-up without being boring: a musical grey area that grows curiouser all the time.
