by Sara Mae (@scary_mae)
Seeing Paper Bee live is a relief – melodies you don’t have to already know to get into, windy dynamics, queer specificity (see “The Little Mermaid is Actually Not a Perfect Metaphor for Being Trans”). Just off the May release of their new fourteen song record, Thaw, Freeze, Thaw, they opened a show in Philly at Ukie Club, still in the blaring heat of summer. There’s a clear constellation of influence with Adult Mom, but Paper Bee are more pastoral lyrically, often blurring between the body and the earth. Even the rhythm of the title, its looping and returning, is reflected in the sweeping structures of the songs, and feels like a mirror of the natural world. “Thaw” is dusky in its hauntedness, and ends on the line “I was wrong,” a kind of reflectiveness that one might only allow themself at night. The bass at the beginning of “To Be Mud” opens into a silty vocal delivery, slow and murky, “It’s not enough to be soft / If you can’t be strong.” The song “Like Oceans” comes just at the right time, a quieter, chugging introspection. The album is cohesive without getting repetitive, and would pair well with a road trip and a massive iced coffee, but that night at Ukie Club, in the turn from July to August, they kept an early bird crowd locked in.
The production of the album itself has been described elsewhere as lo-fi (it was recorded at a cabin in rural PA) but the moments where they chose to make us feel like we are in the room with them are spare and purposeful. The sound of strumming on “To Be Soft” is so intimate versus one of the standout moments on the album, which comes in “I Don’t Talk to You.” The guitar tone when the song picks up is notably more spacey than most of the album, coming after the bitingly concise lines, “I haven’t really felt lonely since I left / you made me feel things much worse than loneliness.”
Nick Berger, primary songwriter for Paper Bee, writes about transness with such clarity, hemming his more direct lines with beautiful scenes of what it means to be liberated in one’s body: “what if we deserve to feel joy / what does it really mean to ask for more / leaving all of our clothes on the shore / letting go of tragic metaphors where changing is to lose something.” The album is the act of imagining those joyous worlds. “Love is Not” names an undoing of hurt, a refrain of “I wanna believe…” There’s a dark sweetness to this song - think cherries in thick grenadine. In “Body of Water,” Berger writes about the transformative effect of small moments, like someone’s mannerisms: “your hands are made of many shifting shapes / I try to track their motion as we speak.”
At one point in the night, “The Heat” has everyone rocking back and forth in unison. It is special to Paper Bee’s project that the songs offer a recognition in something we are hearing for the first time. The rush of multiple singing voices picks up, and Paper Bee’s harmonies are gritty and humid and a part of why we move together, in this particular way.