Bee Careful

I have written before about the difficulties I have found in recent years trying to get hip again. Today, I ran into another obstacle to hipness I wasn’t expecting.

A few weeks back I heard a track called “Imaginary Girl” by the Bees. It reminded me of sugary pop music from the late 60s/early 70s—not bubblegum, exactly, more like rainbow-colored happy hippie music, what’s sometimes called “sunshine pop.” I liked it. So yesterday, I was browsing the listings at the Hype Machine when I found a post at ThaBombShelter devoted to the Bees and their new album Octopus. And I thought, “I’d like to hear some of that.” So I downloaded the tracks and dug them completely, especially “(This Is for the) Better Days.” I found some more Bees over at Nialler9, in a post titled “The Best 60s Band of the 21st Century.” And by now I was thinking, “Hot damn, there’s something for me to blog about, this cool new band I found that people who dig the same things I do are likely to dig as well.”

Not so fast there, old geezer. It turns out that the Bees of “Imaginary Girl” and the Bees with the new album Octopus and “(This Is for the) Better Days” are not the same band. There are two Bees. The “Imaginary Girl” Bees are based in Nashville; the Octopus Bees are from the Isle of Wight in the UK. I could have figured this out if I’d read ThaBombShelter and Nialler9 more carefully, because both posts specify that the UK Bees are known in the States as “A Band of Bees.”

This sort of thing used to happen back in the day, with bands being given altered names to avoid confusion with established bands having similar names. For example, Wham! was known as Wham! UK on their first few American releases. Years before, the Spinners were called the Detroit Spinners in the UK to differentiate them from a Liverpool-based folk group. But it had to have been rather unlikely that anyone would have confused the Detroit Spinners’ sound with that of the Liverpool Spinners. Not so with the Bees, at least not to me—although I suppose somebody with better ears, or ears better tuned to the world of indie rock, might find it absurd that I confused the two Bees at all.

You be the judge—both of which one is which and which one you like. They’re both pretty good, but I think I like A Band of Bees a wee bit better. “(This Is for the) Better Days” is the early front-runner for my favorite new song of the year, and it’s not even the single from the album, apparently.

“Imaginary Girl”/The Bees (US) (buy it here)
“(This Is for the) Better Days”/The Bees (UK) (A Band of Bees) (buy it here)

You can also hear much more of A Band of Bees over at their myspace page.  For the Bees (US) myspace page, go here.