Preview
THE BUZZING BEES
June 5
Night Gallery
June 11
Carpenter’s Union Hall
(All Ages)
Those who heard You’ll Wish You Were Deaf, the 2003 debut from Calgary’s The Buzzing Bees, were no doubt astounded by their jagged guitar riffs and whiplash time and tempo changes. Sure, there are emo bands out there that show their math rock tendencies, but hearing The Bees play you’d think they’d have to be math wizards to pull it off. Well…
"Peter is a math wizard," says guitarist Chris Vanderlaan of the band’s drummer Peter Pivovarov. "He’s actually going to the U of A and taking his pure math master’s right now and they are (giving him a scholarship) to do it. He’s a genius. So Peter can hack it and the rest of us just struggle along."
Their "struggle" has recently resulted in the band’s sophomore release Beep! Beep!, I’m a Jeep – a record that shows this young band evolving nicely. When comparing this album to their last, Vanderlaan notes the length of the songs and while some of them are longer, it’s more symptomatic of the textures The Bees bring to the table this time out. The songs have a more epic structure and producer Jesse Gander joins the band on keyboards for half the album. The result is an album that is both head-shakingly elaborate and heartbreakingly beautiful.
"I guess there’s not as much punk leaning as there was in the past," says Vanderlaan. "It’s not as fast. We try and lay it back and show how awesome a guitar player Brett (Gunther) is."
Further proving the band’s prodigious talent, Gunther plays some viciously intricate guitar melodies, yet he still manages his vocal duties. And while most punk bands are content with verse-chorus-verse structure, The Bees are a bit more ambitious.
"It could get kind of boring always doing the same thing," says Vanderlaan. "The way Brett writes – he doesn’t write vocals that repeat in songs, so it makes it kind of hard to have a chorus even if there is a part that we write as a chorus. Brett will sing different vocals so no one can really tell anyway."
Songs such as "Sorry, I Was Too Busy Being Awesome" work their way to a lyrical conclusion with chugging chords and crashing cymbal fills only to evolve into overlapped cascading guitars. It’s much more fluid than you might expect from a band known for its breakneck song structure, and these intricacies are made all the more apparent when, seconds later, the album offers their comparatively simple cover of The Ramones "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." Ironically it was this song, a three-chord tribute, that proved most challenging for the band.
"That actually wasn’t supposed to be on the album," explains Vanderlaan. "(Gander) only let us do it in one take. I told him when we first started recording that we were going to record the song. (At the end) he was taking down all the mics and stuff and I was like ‘What about that Ramones song?’ And he was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re serious.’"
The Bees finished the song in a record three minutes, but even then they had no intention of including it on the album (their past recording sessions have yielded covers by The Queers and Leonard Cohen that have yet to see the light of day). However when the album was sent for mastering, the song was included by accident and all attempts to get a new copy were unsuccessful.
"I’m happy it’s on it, but it kind of ruins the effect of the last song. We thought the guitars sounded pretty sweet at the end. We wanted that to be kind of what people were left with. Suddenly three seconds later they just hear ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’"
For many bands, this may have been too frustrating to handle, but The Bees obviously have sense of humour enough to let it go. With song titles like "Bite the Curb, It’s Vegan I Swear" or "We Laughed at Your On-Line Diary" it’s clear they don’t take things too seriously. Even their album title, like many of their songs, is based on an inside joke.
"I went to a Christian basketball camp when I was younger," says Vanderlaan, "If you did something wrong, you had to get on your knees and walk around trying to bounce a basketball saying ‘Beep! Beep! I’m a jeep.’" While the rest of the band thought the story was amusing, Vanderlaan’s brothers, who also attended that camp, had a different perspective. "I was telling (that story) in front of my family and my brothers were like, "Uh, that never happened,’" says Vanderlaan. "So maybe I just conjured it."
CELEB TOP FIVE
The Top Five local releases of all time according to Chris Vanderlaan of The Buzzing Bees:
1. The Minks – Van Gundy
2. The Everymen – Sit On It
3. Showdown 76 – Words That Sting
4. Hot Little Rocket – Our Work and Why We Do It
5. Chad Van Gaalen – Infiniheart
Crib Notes
When I tell Chris Vanderlaan of The Buzzing Bees their song "Let’s Go Bark at Girls" has a guitar riff that sounds a bit like "The Holiday Song" by The Pixies he denies it, but he comes clean on The Bees’s predilection for cribbing riffs.
"It must be entirely by accident," he says. "We do pillage riffs – don’t get me wrong – but the Pixies haven’t been a band that we have tried to steal from yet," he says.
"On our first record, half of a song was entirely ripped of from this band – Hooray for Everything – which we actually gave them credit for, just because it was so blatant. We used to always steal riffs from d.b.s… I wouldn’t sit down and try to figure out the song, but I tried to figure out something that sounded similar and kind of bring that."
"The last song on Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica has this awesome bass line in it that is all distorted and shit. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm totally stealing that for one of our songs.’ Not a week later I downloaded a Vail Halen song that steals that exact riff, note for note. I was beat to the punch by the other Chris V (Vail)."
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