by Anika Maculangan
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, a 3-piece indie band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is back with a new album to close off the summer. The twelve track album presents itself as a creature of its own, lurking from out of the shadows, hungry to be heard. This team of ambient yet orchestral sounds is one that we can attribute to Zack Schwartz, Rivka Ravede, and Corey Wichlin, who all together, form a vibrant, soulful stretch of tonality. With electronically manipulated sprawls of noise, stratospheric transcendence seems to be the goal. Sonically multi-layered and synthetic, each song embodies various components that fulfill the sensations of a deep refrain. YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is an album of machinery that has much to offer, with bolts and screws that tie one end of it to another, creating a prosperous authority of melodic harmony.
Tracks like “STRANGER ALIVE” and “SORRY PORE INJECTOR” invoke a rich sense of fluidity, ethereal and uplifting upon every vibration. The rhythmic progression observed in these songs are syncopated and brimming with crescendos, taking you upon every step of the way, one euphoric overdrive after the other. Modulated with polyphonic resonance, the timbres present in these songs do not kid around with textured sustains and hypnotic pulses. On other tracks like “FOUND A BODY” and “SUN SWEPT THE EVENING RED,” there are more apparent doses of reverb brought into the mix, making the vocals chamber-ridden and choral in effect.
Thronged with distortion and brassy allegro, the band sings of such matters like the afterlife, most evident in the song “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE” which discusses themes of grief, loss, and trying to reach out to the deceased. A similar topic is covered in the song “I’VE BEEN EVIL,” which features lyrics like “watching seasons change and me, the same/counting visitors at the soles of boots indent floorboards/no successes, no digressions, none” and “a splinter buried in a hole/a cavity you can’t control/someone is scratching at your skin, begging the house to buy you in” which travail through the message of proceeding and continuing on with one’s life, even after such a radical turning point that so happens to change everything from as they initially were.
Cerebral, symphonious, and piercing with delicate intensity, the band dismisses the formalities of structure and emerges with a new tonality, synonymous to what may be described as an overwhelming jolt of rapturous bliss. Despite the band’s inclinations toward the subject of death, the tracks on this album are bound to awaken one from the dead, as it cuts to silent portions, and jumps right into a boisterous sequence with everything and anything going on in it. The album is in no shape or form, for the faint-hearted, since it's a rollercoaster ride of an album that in its grandiosity, is a profuse pastiche of what is real and what is not.
In this dizzying sentiment, we are left with a motley of different things to feel, each with their own color of emotion. It makes all the more sense that the band is named after a movie of the same title, to which alludes to the story of a little girl living in an oppressive state to which she faces internal strifes with ‘monsters’ who precede to haunt her childhood. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, particularly on this album, provokes the same kind of fantastical nature and mystical essence, which call forth the spirits that live in the cracks of the wall. The album is a gentle knocking on heaven’s door, not a clanging bang or a thumping slam, but a tender hammering that is awarded with fruitful beats — of which makes the ghosts dance, whether day or night.