Album Premiere & Review: Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, Aion
[Click play above to stream Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree’s ‘Aion’ in its entirety. It’s out Friday through Magnetic Eye Records with preorders available here.]
From the outset of its 12-minute opening title-track, the intention of Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree‘s third album, Aion, is immersion. To build a world and place the listener in it. The Stuttgart, Germany, four-piece make their label-debut on Magnetic Eye Records with the sprawling, eight-song/79-minute 2LP, which is also their first studio outing in four years since 2019’s Grandmother (review here), though 2022 brought Harvestmen (Live) (review here), perhaps in part as a holdover while Aion was completed. And time would seem to matter here, at least if the band’s penchant for purposeful title choices — their first album was 2017’s duly healing Medicine (review here) — is anything to go by, as Aion feels in some ways as thought it’s working with a snapshot of life, a moment in time, as its central lyrical theme. “Aion” itself, amid the vast echoing reaches of guitar from Simon Weinrich (also vocals, synth) and Lucas Dreher, the depth of vibration from Christopher Popowitsch‘s bass, and the rolling drums of Marc Dreher (also vocals), begins with a quick intro of sampled street noise, fading-in soft guitar and synth drone. There’s a voice, a laugh maybe, and it seems to be a child playing. Footsteps. A car pulls in. The song starts.
In addition to being a preface to the four-minute ambient piece “Courtyard,” which seems positioned to be the introduction for the second of Aion‘s two LPs, the opening of “Aion” seems as well to set up a theme of trust betrayed, specifically a child’s trust and perhaps more specifically a story of a child abused by a priest working toward finding some measure of inner peace and understanding for the world around them. This isn’t made explicit, as such, but in the lyrics, the first word of the album is “tithe” — referencing of course the catholic practice of giving 10 percent of one’s income to the church — a soothing voice becoming subtly sinister as it grows greedy in the final verse, while “Divergence” speaks toward something being that shouldn’t be and side B’s “Threatening,” the lyrics of which are five lines total, working in impressionistic imagery:
Threatening a child in awe
Everyone has gone inside
Kneeling down toward
Stripping away the sheets
Every trace washed away
I’ll hedge bets and say this is my interpretation, rather than one that Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree have said is the basis for Aion in narrative terms, but even if that story was not the one they originally intended to tell, I’ll argue it’s valid just the same. Across the first half of the album, which wraps with the two-minute standalone guitar meditation “Consonance,” the band fill out an aural scope that feels exponentially grown out from their prior work, and not just in runtime. Aion realizes in its largesse and slow, gradual flows, builds, crashes and comedowns a complete vision of the band’s sound, captured at this moment, and can be blinding in its shimmer or crushing in its heft at a given moment without sounding out of place, or forced, or like whatever they’re doing doesn’t belong in the ether they’ve conjured.
Though “Divergence” (7:00) has some shouts and a riff that feels relatively grounded in comparison to the floating churn of “Aion” before it, vocals are exclusively clean on the first half of the album while the second looses some screams at points in “Excavation” (8:05), “Scouring the Earth” (11:59) and closer “Grey Wels,” though they don’t come up until nearly 20 minutes into the song’s total 21:26, after a stretch of ultra-swirling synth drones and cosmic doom guitar noise has pushed as deeply into sonic hypnotism as Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree here go. This split between LPs, further emphasized with “Consonance” leading into “Courtyard,” with its birdsong and initial serenity gradually shifting toward foreboding synth and — as there would almost have to be somewhere throughout — a tolling churchbell along with some rainfall as it fades to silence, the ideas of inner exploration applying through the subsequent “Excavation” and “Scouring the Earth” before “Grey Wels” offers some kind of resolution in nature, its lyrics referencing ringing broken bells, judges, and the wels, which is the largest freshwater fish in Southern Europe.
Nightfishing as catharsis? Maybe. I won’t claim to fully understand the storyline if there even is one, but there’s no question that the final three tracks (after “Courtyard”) grow darker than did the first three (before “Consonance”), with standout bass and keyboard wash in “Scouring the Land” leading to the arrival of a particularly agonized scream toward which the more straightforward noise-doom riffing in the latter half of “Excavation,” with its own screams there, seems to be building. Right down to the way it rises out of silence just past minute six of the 12-minute penultimate cut, that scream in “Scouring the Land” brims with intention. It stops the song, moving into cymbal wash and drone/bass that makes its way back to full-bore with flashes of progressive post-doom and the album’s greatest sense of urgency, coming apart near the end but not fading out as even “Divergence” did with its ending of troubled noise, but allowing for the silence of “Grey Wels” to begin the process of that song building its ambience essentially from nothing.
And while consistent in tone, dimensionality and dynamic, “Grey Wels” is inherently a focal point and feels like it’s intended to stand apart. Its gently-delivered maybe-summary lyrics and consuming, percussive, contemplative instrumental course remind of long-ago Dutch explorers Mühr — and I recognize that’s not the first time I’ve said that about Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree; I stand by it — but it should be noted that the mastery they show in guiding the complex course of their finale belongs to no one else. Each time they present themselves with an opportunity to lose control, they instead lock it down, and as “Grey Wels” moves like moon-reflecting water through its heavy post-rocking midpoint swell into the quiet before the last build across the record’s eight-or-so concluding minutes, they sound like they’ve become the band they set out to be, and even if my take on the theme is dead wrong, it speaks to the level of engagement wrought through Aion and the evocative character of their songwriting.
Aion is not an easy, universal listen. Yes, one can of course hear it without diving into a story or interpreting the lyrics some other way — I had a completely different narrative for it at first, sparked by the inviting nature of the way “Aion” seems to surround the listener on all sides — but on whatever level one might want to take it on, it’s ready. And for the band themselves, Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree reach a new level of composition, patience and breadth. It is a stunning, sometimes sad, sometimes beautiful, sometimes both, sometimes harsh, sometimes barely there course, but through every turn and change in mood, tempo or volume, they execute with care and passion in kind, making the fact of pushing post-metallic cosmic doom forward as a style secondary to the statement of this album itself.
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