Heavy serenity. Having never been so fortunate to see Stuttgart, Germany’s Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree live (yet), the 2022 four-song/45-minute live album, Harvestmen (Live), recorded between shows in their home country and neighboring Austria captures well an in-room hypnotic vibe. That is to say, listening to the resonant guitar echoes, the crunching basslines and the steady flowing drums of 15-minute opener and longest track (immediate points), “Sail Away I” — taken from their 2017 debut album Medicine (review here) — is immersive in precisely the way one would hope. And though the recording is obviously off the board, properly mixed by guitarist/vocalist Simon Weinrich, joined in the four-piece by guitarist Lucas Dreher, drummer/vocalist Marc Dreher and bassist Christopher Popowitsch, and mastered by Ralv Milberg, the feeling of hearing the sound echo off a back club wall behind me — that truest sense of ‘surround sound’ — comes through entirely in the spacious reaches being portrayed.

Vocals reverb up from beneath the driving groove of the apex of “Sail Away I,” definitively stoner rock on the face of its riff, but spread wider into something else. It’s not just about playing slow — in fact, “Sail Away I” isn’t that slow at all, though neither would I call it speedy — but it’s the way the song seems to invite you along with it. There’s room for everyone. The music floats up, swings down, turns side to side and does the occasional antigravity backflip as it goes, and the feeling of post-rock-born serenity in the opening guitar line of the subsequent “Craving” — from 2019’s second album, Grandmother (review here) — is met with heavy psych noodling that is a microgenre staple but nonetheless memorable enough to be definitively the band’s own. The vocals enter softly at first over that guitar, and there’s a thicker roll that takes hold in the second half of the song, but it’s more about drift than linearity, and even if it’s a build into that crashing crescendo, the path they take to get there is no less important than where they get.

That’s due in large part to the patience of their delivery and the spirit of the songs themselves. The subsequent “Dionysus” also comes from Grandmother and starts with a suitably meditative hum. The band’s melting together of divergent ideas, and more, the fluidity with which they execute their material live as captured here, are strengths in the studio as well. Live, maybe unsurprisingly, the chemistry between the band comes across in the tempos, the sense of their being on stage together, maybe head signals calling out a change, maybe not — might depend on how many shows they’d done on this run when these recordings were made — is likewise resonant to the music they’re making. I’m all the more prepared to call them undervalued as a group at this point after listening to Harvestmen (Live), though however many years on from the development of the sound, one could say the same thing of heavy psychedelia as a whole.

Naturally, Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree offer more than stand-in fodder for the genre they might inhabit — whether that’s heavy psych, fuzz rock, etc. — but if they’re emblematic of it that doesn’t necessarily mean they lack individual purpose, and in that, Harvestmen (Live) conveys their progressive intentions well. The band said upon the release earlier this year that their new studio album, titled Aion, is complete and ready for release through Pink Tank Records — also responsible for physical pressing of the live outing, along with Made of Stone Recordings — and that prospect finds manifestation here in the inclusion of closing track “Threatening.” Following the 13-minute “Dionysus” is no easy task, with its gracefully unfolding drone washand gradual transformation into a surge of crash and riffing intensity, and transition into a vocal-topped heavy shoegaze verse that’s enough to remind that Radiohead‘s The Bends turns 25 this year.

“Dionysus” comes all the way around for a second swell before its gentle letting-down, met here by deserved applause, and “Threatening” likewise earns its place as the capper and its title with a more brooding, exploration. With the vocals weaving together semi-shouted verse lines over sustained “aah” backing lines and the cosmic churning behind, the effect is heavy enough to channel Ufomammut, but here too the band’s purposes are their own. I will not claim to know what spaces they might create on Aion — we’ll find out when the time is right, I suppose — but the darker turn in “Threatening” is perhaps more suited to the times than the band could’ve possibly known when they recorded whichever show it was from, and while I don’t know the plan for Aion‘s release, and given the variety of mood in their first two records I don’t expect that any single song will speak for the whole — have I introduced enough caveats yet? truth be told I’m not even sure “Threatening” is new or on the impending LP at all even if it is; I know nothing.

Except this: Over the last two weeks, I’ve completed reviews for 100 albums, and though exhausting, that 100 albums is by no means exhaustive. This proves it. I’ve said this before, I know, but there’s so much out there right now, the heavy underground is so alive at this moment, so rife with forward thinking creativity. Yeah, some of it’s crap, of course, and derivative or misogynistic, has cartoon boobs on its cover art — a perpetual trope, it seems, which sadly will likely outlive us all — and so on, but then you have an act like Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree who acknowledge what came before in their sound as well from others and consider both a foundation to keep exploring, keep growing, keep making something new. That conversation between art and art, regardless of borders, ideologies or time, is the most crucial way innovation happens on a creative level. Art begets art, and I’m pretty sure I said this earlier this week sometime, but as regards human beings generally, art is one of precious few redeeming aspects.

So thanks for the art. And thanks for reading. As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

Summer of Pivot continues. I write from behind pushing a swing at the playground, 9:15AM. The Patient Mrs. and the now-vaccinated Pecan were going to go to Connecticut today. I was going to work in the morning, answer emails that have fallen through the cracks the last two weeks, and perhaps spend the afternoon fucking off, watching Star Trek and ignoring humanity. So of course yesterday she starts feeling achy and feverish. Yes, she has covid. Doesn’t seem overly serious. She’s home in bed. I’m at the playground. Summer of Pivot.

And though I’m ready to execute plan B, C, D, E, etc., as need be, I am very very ready to pivot away from bullshit toward less bullshit.

New Gimme show today 5PM Eastern. You’ll either listen or not. I can’t control that shit and I’m not good enough at social media to pretend otherwise.

Great and safe weekend. Drink water, watch your head, life is meaningless and we all know it deep down so try not to be a dick.

FRM.

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Tags: Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree Harvestmen (Live), Germany, Harvestmen (Live), Made of Stone Recordings, Pink Tank Records, Stuttgart

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2022 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.