The Bees The Story Two years isn’t exactly an eternity, yet somehow the perception has bedded down that The Bees’ Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher have been away for longer than was strictly necessary. As if, after releasing their lauded Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Sunshine Hit Me, in 2002, the aisle of Wighters mumbled, “We are going out for a walk, we may be some time.” And duly disappeared. Granted, time does seem to tick a tad differently on the island, which is just one of its many attraction. For a band who are fiercely proud “and protective” of their roots. Now, though, with two years of almost solid touring and three fecund weeks at Abbey Road Studios behind them, Paul and Aaron are poised to unleash a second helping of hard to categorize, impossible to ignore, music on us. One listen to Free the Bees will convince you it was worth the wait. A couple more listens and, you will be back on the same gently lapping wavelengths that made Sunshine Hit Me such a heavy rotation play in the nation’s disc drives. What, though, of the shed – the fabled assembly-kit instruction in Paul’s parents garden where Sunshine took shape, and which the duo swore they would never contemplate leaving? It’s still there, as it happens. But Paul and Aaron have since, Help-style shacked up together in a nearby house, one floor each with a studio between them. The plan was to record their follow-up here: until, that is, Paul did a stint in the record producer’s chair for fellow Islander Drew at Abbey Road, and was exposed to the gravitational pull of the studio where a certain four-piece from Liverpool once made history. Two years ago, I asked them what they would do if they couldn’t record in the shed. The response then was a look of horror on both of their faces. The answer now: “We thought, simple: we’ll be in the best studio in the world.” If you were in any doubt that the contractual switches and resulting delays of the past two years had had an effect on the badnd, even the briefest exposure to Free the Bees dispels them. Lead single “Wash in the Rain” typifies both the tone and pace. Lashings of Hammond, a great big top of the mix bass line, a dirty old guitar riff, and someone in the distance having a ball with his ole pee-yaner. On top of his glorious mess of vocal from Paul that attests to months of wearing his voice to a sandpapered frazzle on the road (or “learning how to shout”). An icing on the cake, Aaron’s trademark double-edged lyrics – lines like “try and I fail…sometimes I even succeed” doing that crafty Fletcher thing of ringing a bell faintly on first listen, and then going off with the impact and resonance of a depth-charged everafter. Ask Aaron what impels his to write his dreamy but distinctly ambiguous lyrics and he will shrink into a corner, like a schoolboy who’s just been asked to recite a poem at prize-giving. “A bit of fantasy, a bit of reality” was about all I could get out of him, plus an admission that his hope for a song is that “You can relate to it and then you can dream about it.” As they have shown us before, The Bees like to slow things down a bit, too, and songs don’t come much woozier or more blessed-out than “I Love You,” a track that takes the band escapist ethos and bottles its essence for our delectation. Tempations-type backing vocals underpin Paul’s croony rendition – through a vintage 1960’s RCD mic - of Aaron’s laid-bare words: “You wouldn’t walk away if my stories, they weren’t true.” But the band that once romped through a minhamenina also have a fondness pell-mell, hurdling sonic mayhem, and a frankly sectionable Chicken Payback proves that life across the Solent isn’t all lazy-Sunday-afternoons-spent-flat-on-their-backs-in-the-tall-grass (though for sheer musical and lyrical inertia, the Aaron-vocaled Go-Cart takes some beating with its stupefied lamentation that there’s plenty of room for advantage: it’s the effort required that makes me so tired.”) “Sunshine Hit Me” was the work of two shed-bound mates, eyeball to eyeball, across their analog equipment. Free The Bees sees the band in their expanded form, first as friends and now as fellow Bees (yes, and, still friends), Chris Berkin (guitar), Michael Clevett (drums), Tim Parkin (trumpet), and Warren Hampshire (Hammond) has been playing with Paul and Aaron for years in any number of incarnations – from special occasion free-for-alls to back-to-mine jams – so when it came to bolstering the line-up and taking their music on the road, the original duo didn’t have to look far. Two years on, that scratch band has become a crack one. There is no evidence of the growing pains that often bedevil follow-up albums recorded with additional personal and the dubious luxury of a multi-track recording desk. Even in Abbey Road, the maximum the band allowed themselves was 16 tracks. And if anything, Free The Bees is cruder than it’s predecessor, at least in terms of its sonic finish and is all the more liberating as a result.