Laura Kerry
The much-anticipated second full-length of indie rockers The Spirit of the Beehive begins with a cinematic flurry of violin notes. Then “Pleasure Suck I” launches into a dense and catchy garage-rock part with bells to give it a pop brightness. Then, after moments of dissonance and fuzz, it lets loose a slow, echoing refrain, “Pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” before dissolving into a muffled, shuffling sound effect. This is the disorienting manner in which all of Pleasure Suck progresses, with pop following alternative following abstracted, indecipherable space noise. At one point in listening to the album, a transition hit so abruptly that it caused me to jump. (Spoiler: Beware of “Twenty First Road Trip.”)
The Philadelphia-based band creates perplexing and surprising music, but the most interesting surprise is the way that that music manages to hang together so coherently. Pleasure Suck is a patchwork of different textures, styles, and sounds, but the gestalt is—to (perhaps unwisely) continue with the metaphor—a quilt of sometimes-warm, sometimes-jagged psych-rock that jangles as much as it jolts.
In “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’),” for example, a succession of dissonant intervals in the voice and distorted guitar give way to a catchy chorus: “You don’t need an education ... It’s only in your mind.” The Spirit of the Beehive picks up this slacker strain again throughout the album, including in “Cops Come Looking,” in which they sing, “I’m stoned again / I don’t know you / Think I’m searching,” in a clean but hazy style that sounds like Real Estate after smoking all day on a worn-down porch. “Mono Light Crash,” a spoken story about a Texan arriving at Logan Airport in Boston without his luggage, gels into a rhythmic, guitar-driven pop song accented by disembodied, sampled voices. In “Becomes the Truth,” concentrated noise punctuated by screechy feedback follows a suspenseful drone into a spacious pop track that declares, nonchalantly but convincingly, “No one tell me what to do.”
That relaxed defiance carries through much of Pleasure Suck, but at its core, the album is anything but relaxed. As they reveal in each shift, build, and explosion, The Spirit of the Beehive make meticulous music. Their fuzz isn’t just an effect, but a layered substance comprised of multiple guitars, synths, and voices in just the right mixture; their tone isn’t just nervousness, but a tension created between dissonance and breezy pop; and their abrupt changes aren’t just tricks, but calculated movements designed to tug us in deliberate directions. Or maybe not. Maybe The Spirit of the Beehive is just fucking with us after all. Whatever their angle, though, it’s working.