The Bees "High Society"

So I guess it's been a pretty fruitful year for new-classic rock, if you'll excuse my term for a moment. Some of this year's best songs have lifted significant musical elements from the Seventies---as sliced by classic rock (and lite-rock) radio programmers. Belle and Sebastian's "The Blues are Still Blue," The Concretes' "Grey Days," Midlake's "Roscoe," Tacks' "Frozen Feet," the Decemberists' "The Perfect Crime," Shearwater's "Seventy-Four Seventy-Five," Sleepy Jackson's "I Understand What You Want...," and a few more that skip my mind presently, along with pretty good new records from Elton John and Lindsey Buckingham, can more than cue you in to what I'm talking about. Well, onto that list, we (or okay, I) can graft just about the entire new album from The Bees (the U.S. version, I'm obliged to inform), High Society. Like what the M's did earlier this year with 60s mod and early 70s glam on Future Women, the Bees construct an album of homages to a highly specific sound---or perhaps tone is better. They don't succeed as often as the M's do, but perhaps that's because soft-rock has as many groaners as it does classics. So, when they lift a significant portion of the chorus from 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" for the song "High Society" (mp3), my ears prick up and I write a post about it. The fact that the chorus is the best thing about the song shouldn't detract you from noticing the verse on the way there, because it's got some nice moments, like that synth trickle and the vroom that takes the song into the chorus. It's completely ruled by a highly artificial form of nostalgia and a thick layer of cheese, but try listening to it on a chilly fall afternoon and not imagining yourself in a homemade Super-8 film or something.



Buy High Society from CDBaby (remember them?) here. The Bees have a webthing too.