Philadelphia indie psychedelia dons’ Spirit Of The Beehive have teamed up once again with Ice Age and Ranch Records to release You Are Arrived (But You’ve Been Cheated), an EP follow-up to last years eponymous LP.
“This is going to be a trying experience.” When the first of a series of short voice overs and samples from movies wash over You Are Arrived (But You’ve Been Cheated), you hear these words, and the band sees to it that they remain true for at least the next sixteen minutes. It’s going to be trying because there’s not a word spoken on this album that doesn’t ring true, and perhaps the EP’s confident and almost immediate affirmation of its own emotionality is testament to the more universal aspects of its truth.
This initial nugget of charmed and uncannily resonant verbiage comes at the halfway point of the EP’s opener “SPK,” a song that up until that moment felt analogous to Evander Holyfield trying to win a heavyweight title from your gut. It opens with pitch bending synths timed to the opening of beer cans (at least it’s more fun to imagine there’s beer in the cans) all unfurling into a wall of unrelenting guitar that sounds something like a coked out FIDLAR channeling their inner My Bloody Valentine. You Are Arrived makes use of it’s influences paradoxically, in a way that doesn’t ask a lot of the listener and in a way that’s so undoubtedly unique that you forget it “sounds like anything.” While the band does the sludgy-gaze collab well, they don’t tether themselves to that style of play. Cuts like “You Are Arrived” and “Joan” exude a Mr. Twin Sister brand of tight and seductive neurosis.
You Are Arrived is a cocktail of aggression, burning feels, and weightlessness. As a record it doesn’t give an inch. It just tells it’s story and peaces out, and that’s the kind of low-calorie, not overly direct but not lost in itself, art that truly embodies what it is to say something uniquely.
Check out the stream below
