The Bees – Free The Bees
(Astralwerks)

I don’t know too much about the Bees. In fact, I hadn’t heard of them until I checked out their latest album, Free the Bees, but apparently they’ve already found minor success in Britain from their first release ‘Sunshine Hit Me’. The story goes that the two songwriters shacked up, literally, in a shack and wrote their first album. This time around, they’ve moved from a shack to…Abbey Road Studios of course! Although I haven’t heard their first record, I’m assuming they left much of their inspiration in that infamous shack in exchange for the creatively blessed Beatles holy ground, and it definitely shows.

This album is one of the most convincingly retro sounding records I’ve ever heard. Although it’s not that original, it’s done so well that it’s hard to be critical of how much The Bees borrow from The Kinks, Creation, and of course, The Beatles. The album starts off with ‘These are the Ghosts’, sounding more like a bass heavy retro nod then an actual step back in time, but as the album progresses, the influences are hard to miss. ‘Go Karts’ could fool even the hardest Beatles fan. ‘Chicken Payback’ seems to dip into the fifties, giving Gen X’ers their opportunity to come up with their own extreme version of the twist.

Some people may have troubles looking past the obvious lack of originality, which is unfortunate seeing as they’re probably going to stick up their noses to this pop album that’s just as guilty as the White Stripes ‘homage’ to the blues, Bloc Party’s tip of the hat to Gang of Four, The Futureheads nod to the Jam, and so on and so on. Isn’t it alright to just like an album for what it is rather then turning it into a history lesson? I think in this case I’ll skip class and highly recommend this album. — Jay C.

SCORE:

Recommended If You Like: The Datsons (Montreal), The High Dials, The Beatles, The Kinks

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