For a second, it’s possible to feel like you’ve walked into your own Life On Mars experience when listening to this single.
The mono recording sound and jazzy vibe that hugs this song like a sheepskin coat is bound to produce hallucinogenic flashbacks, leaving you with an inkling to ring up the Antiques Roadshow to find out the original date of this release.
It’s also possible to find modern day equivalents though in this release. The trumpets that blare through the choruses could be from Amy Winehouse’s album, or Mark Ronson’s Radiohead cover Just on a slower speed.
The equivalents aside, this song is made for now. With all the new wave monochrome culture buzzing around our ears, its also important to recall the soul movement that ran near parallel to that snapshot of culture in previous years.
Suddenly, you realise it’s ok to not listen to cold, calculated ‘jagged’ songs, and that math-rock needn’t rule the world. As the song goes: “Let Love Be The Reason”, and how right they are. It’s even possible to pick up strains of Bob Marley in the distance, begging to come to the fore.
Second track I Still Got Your Number is just as time warping. You can’t escape the brazen Beach Boys barbershop “Do-wah”, the Hawaiian guitar and the tightropes that this song skips along from becoming Wouldn’t It Be Nice, or many other upbeat sixties songs, for that matter.
It all seems light-years away from their 2002 track, Angryman. Since then, The Bees have grown up and matured in sound, but in evolutionary terms have managed to regress. Work that one out…