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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