To those of you who think Psychedelic Rock and good old Blues Rock died in the sixties or seventies, I say phooey! These genres are making a big comeback. If you long to hear new music that reminds you of your favorite bands of old (e.g. Zeppelin, Cream, Jethro Tull, The Kinks, Pink Floyd), then may I introduce to you WOLF PEOPLE and THE BEES. Both bands are British, have new albums out this week, and kick some major ass.
I’ve been listening to The Bees for several years now (they have four albums, Sunhine Hit Me, Free the Bees, Octopus, and Every Step’s A Yes) and they continue to be one of my favorite bands. Wolf People, on the other hand, are a recent discovery. They just released their second album today entitled STEEPLE.
Here are some bios, videos, and live performances to whet your appetite:
“Wolf People are an English psychedelic rock band based in London, Bedford and North Yorkshire. They formed in 2006 around the release of a very limited CD EP on Sea Records as part of the Lifeboat Series. The EP was Stuart Maconie’s record of the week on his BBC6 show. They have since released two 7” singles on Battered Ornaments Records, they quickly sold out and are now becoming quite sought after. The band have been embraced by the psych community receiving great praise in Shindig magazine and Terrascope.com amongst others. Influenced by Captain Beefheart, Can, Pentangle, Dungen, Amon Duul II and television, the music is largely blues rock based but incorporates elements of folk, jazz, kraut, and country. Wolf People signed to JAGJAGUWAR records in Autumn 2009 and are releasing their label debut TIDINGS, a collection of singles and EP tracks, on 22nd February 2010.”
“The Bees (known as “A Band of Bees” in America, owing to a rights conflict over their name) started out as the duo of Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher, both of whom hailed from the Isle of Wight. They recorded their debut album, Sunshine Hit Me, in a home studio in a shed in Butler’s parents’ garden. Butler and Fletcher, both multi-instrumentalists and singers, were avid record collectors and, even more so, avid record listeners with interests that extend back to the roots of British rock and into American soul, as well as a multitude of other directions. Sunshine Hit Me, released by We Love You as a U.K.-only issue and credited to the Bees, reflected their interests and listening, melding ’60s freakbeat and psychedelic sensibilities with ’70s power pop, and got nominated for the coveted Mercury Music Prize in 2002.
The Mercury nomination and the album’s critical success led to the assembly of an actual band, and a couple of years of steady touring. When the smoke cleared, the Bees were officially a sextet with everyone writing songs and switching off on instruments (and Fletcher doing their lyrics). And instead of recording their second album in the Butler family garden shed, as they’d intended, Butler’s stint producing another act at EMI ended up with the group booking three weeks there. It took that long for the six members — Kris Birkin, Michael Clevitt, Tim Parkin, Warren Hampshire, Butler, and Fletcher (all of them except lead guitarist Birkin multi-instrumentalists) — to create Free the Bees. Released in the summer of 2004 on the Virgin imprint, the album got rave reviews in England and earned notice in the United States as well, working its way into better stores and eliciting positive reviews from critics who normally would never have known about it. The group’s work has been variously compared to that of the Small Faces (and the Faces), the Beatles, the Byrds, Donovan, the Kinks, the Temptations, and early Pink Floyd, with some other interesting permutations. Butler, for example, counts his own influences as Lee Perry, King Tubby, and Fela Kuti. They saw further commercial success when the tracks “Chicken Payback” and “Wash in the Rain,” off of Free the Bees, were both picked up for use in television commercials.
In 2007, reduced to a quintet with Clevitt’s departure, they released Octopus, a brilliant, wide-ranging pop/rock opus that had inventiveness and unexpected influences quietly oozing out from between every note and chorus. Its feet were planted in 2007, but its musical influences looked back to the Kinks of Village Green Preservation Society and the Small Faces of “The Universal.” As with much of their earlier work, the album seemed to demand attention as much as it elicited delight, like a book the reader can’t put down. For all of their seeming ’60s influences, the group comes off as startlingly contemporary, just willing to reach back to artists and styles they admire when it suits them and the music at hand.”
And finally, I Really Need Love – A song from the bees new album!
-keith
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