[Click play above to stream ‘Cinitus’ from Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree’s new album, Grandmother, out Feb. 28.]

It’s not just that the direction Germany’s Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree take on their second album, Grandmother, is unexpected. It’s that they take that direction so well and so completely. The Stuttgart-based four-piece of guitarist/vocalist Simon Weinrich, guitarist Lucas Dreher, bassist Christopher Popowitsch and drummer/vocalist Marc Dreher made an impressive debut in 2017 with the similarly concisely-titled Medicine (review here), and thereby reveled in an expansive take on heavy psychedelia. Song structures were fluid, tones by and large were warm, and where vocals came up, they added to the overarching atmosphere of mellow exploration. In short: cool vibe, good record. The kind of thing that would make you want to chase down a follow-up.

Now, with Grandmother — a word that, like “medicine,” is bound to evoke some kind of image or emotion or at least association in the mind of just about anyone who sees it — the four-piece present through Pink Tank Records four tracks over the course of an expansive 45 minutes, infused with a linear dynamic split between its two sides. I’m not ready to call it post-metal, but there are times where its post-heavy psychedelia comes close, though as they show in the consuming 17-minute opener and by far longest track (immediate points) “Cinitus,” they’re no less likely to drone out on some cosmic doom à la the criminally undernoticed Mühr than they are to burst into a cacophonous echo of space rocking thrust before crashing into a massive roll and devolving to interweaving wisps of guitar effects. Really, “Cinitus” is an album unto itself — or at least an EP — but paired with the seven-minute “Craving” on side A, which presents a more straightforward linear build with vocals more direct in the mix, it highlights the scope that Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree have so readily taken upon themselves. It’s not just about sounding big or broad — though they have both at their disposal, certainly — but about emotional conveyance through aesthetic expression. It is gorgeous and complex in kind.

Like a relationship. Like family. It’s never all joy, and it’s never all misery. It’s a concept or a theme that runs deep enough to encompass anything, and at the same time still be open to the interpretation of the listener. As “Cinitus” careens its way toward the massive rolling slowdown that hits just before the 10-minute mark, a stretch of vocals seem to call up from beneath the guitar to provide an essential human presence ahead of the drift to come, and it’s one more way in which the band showcase the thoughtfulness of the shift in sound presented throughout Grandmother. This is not the clumsy donning of a style. This isn’t a band trying something on to see how it fits. One gets the sense that somewhere in the two short years since Medicine, Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree decided they wanted their sound to do something else, and as a unit, they consciously made a choice to work toward that.

Their success in that regard is writ large throughout “Cinitus” and “Craving,” as well as “Grandmother” and “Dionysus” on side B, which both run about 10 minutes to convey something of an evening out even as their structures remain varied within themselves, with the former patiently moving through a spacious progression underscored by tension in the drums and rumbling low end, while the band hold back the full blastoff for the latter — though perhaps the closer’s most effective moment is the stretch in its second half where it drops the wash of noise and lets the vocals carry a moment of clarity ahead of the finale. Either way, the ambient sense of Grandmother is crucial to its execution throughout, and for all the consciousness that may be at work in the band’s growth from the first album to the second, they don’t at all lose sight of the emotional context they’re bringing to the proceedings. In the pulls of the guitar in “Cinitus” or the way “Grandmother” resolves itself in a combination of stomp and surge before a last wash of cymbals and resonant guitar gives way to a sampled rainstorm, the songs are as much gut as brain. It’s the malleable direction of one over the other that makes Grandmother such a resounding offering.

The pairing of the title-track and “Dionysus” is especially telling in that despite their similar runtimes — recall “Cinitus” is more than 10 minutes longer than “Craving” back on side A — they’re deceptively different in the ground they cover. If one puts a narrative of mourning to the progression of songs, then the reference to the goddess governing wine and song — Bacchus to the Romans — might be seen as a repast, especially after that rainstorm. But either way, it is where Grandmother finds its ending, and there is a palpable sense of letting go as the last verse recedes just before it hits 7:30 and begins to transition into the last wash that serves as its culmination. Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree are never out of control, in that moment or elsewhere, and that’s something they reinforce with a last return to the quiet guitar line that serves as central figure to the closer as they make their way out.

But that sense of control, too, is fluid, and if anything has carried over from the band’s prior outing, it’s their ability to hold sway over longform structures, toying with the listener’s consciousness while retaining a full hold on what they’re doing. They have taken on this breadth of approach in such a way that makes it easy to think they’ve “found” their niche and will from here work to refine it. That might happen, or it might not. But for a band who already seemed so sure of their take to turn elsewhere is remarkable. It shows not only are Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree capable of such a thing, but they’re bold enough to actually do it and pull it off. As to where that might take their craft going forward, they’ve also just made themselves far less predictable, which is another of Grandmother‘s noteworthy achievements.

Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, Grandmother (2019)

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