- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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A monumental step forward in the progression of the group's sound.
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Entertainment WeeklyOne of Britain's best-kept secrets. [8 Jul 2005, p.71]
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Under The RadarEven though the stylistic diversity of the first album isn't present, it's hard not to get caught up in the dreamy spell that The Bees weave. [#7]
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UncutAs satisfying as it is stylish. [Jul 2004, p.95]
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New Musical Express (NME)Some of 'Free The Bees' could have been recorded 40 years ago and some of it could have been beamed down from an orbiting space station 3,000 years further along the pipe than us. [26 Jun 2004, p.54]
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It’s comparable to blending all the best bits of Led Zep and hippie rockers Grateful Dead, with a spoonful of Motown classics to help the medicine go down.
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Free the Bees is all worth hearing, a lot more than once, and it could be the Album of the Year -- the only question is if that year is 2004 or 1968.
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BlenderOnly a central, three-track lull--where grooves are preferred over songs--sours this eclectic, irresistible stew. [Jul 2005, p.114]
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Free the Bees shows a group of skilled musicians who are comfortable in their style and songwriting, and it plays like it was unearthed in a warehouse basement, where it was hidden for the last forty years.
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UrbAmong the most engaging albums of the year. [Jul/Aug 2005, p.108]
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It’s not going to change the musical horizon, as there’s absolutely nothing new here. But the oldies – the hilarious Chicken Payback, the beautiful 50s ballad I Love You, or the exuberantly wonderful One Glass of Water – are strong enough to make this both a worthy successor and a promise for the future.
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Q MagazineGlows with retro colour. [Jul 2004, p.110]
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It really is quite difficult to believe that the band behind Free the Bees is the same one responsible for Sunshine Hit Me; while one record isn't necessarily stronger than the other and both are equally eclectic, they seem to be jumpstarted by wildly dissimilar muses.
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The Bees are quirky enough to avoid being anybody's museum curator.
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Paste MagazineTheir sheer retro enthusiasm compensates for the music's derivativeness--for some of the tracks at least. [Aug/Sep 2005, p.111]
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The band's greatest success is their ability to craft unassuming, enjoyable revival rock numbers with clever lyrics, recalling their musical forebears without ever descending to cliché.
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The melodies are mostly jaunty and the stoner harmonies solar-powered enough to lull around your brain but there’s no disguising the fact it’s a disappointingly one-dimensional record stuffed with half-baked ideas (“The Start”) and devoid of a single original thought.
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In lieu of messing around in the dark fringes of slightly bizarre café music, Free The Bees is a straight up rock album more in line with Iron Butterfly and the Small Faces than Morcheeba or Quantic.
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Plays mostly as a digest of fairly enjoyable if not particularly memorable shaggy-haired rockers in the Kinks or Small Faces mold with little material to rival Sunshine's radiant highs.
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To be fair Free The Bees isn’t a bad record as such, it’s just that this backwards looking, past-is-best philosophy so often smacks of a distasteful and conservative obsession with authenticity and tradition, as if sounding like the past is more important than sounding like yourselves.
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Nothing comes close to the [early tracks], though plenty of interesting bits are strewn about.
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Yet no amount of reverb-drenched vocals, acid-flashback harmonies or Hammond organs can prevent The Bees from being a bunch of blokes from the Isle of Wight who happen to have better record collections than songwriting abilities.
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The band falls apart attempting to sound like the whole of the late ’60s and the start of the early ’70s all at once, like listening to The Notorious Byrd Brothers, American Beauty, Moby Grape’s self-titled, the Hollies’ Stop! Stop! Stop! , and a Sloan record played simultaneously; a tepid mash of classic styles all fine on their own that cancel each other out when played together.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 21
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Mixed: 1 out of 21
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Negative: 2 out of 21
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BerthaJul 16, 2007
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GabeHMay 9, 2006
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JamesDec 3, 2005