Mouthful of Bees: You can't teach heart
Wednesday 03 January @ 17:30:28 |
  by STEVE McPHERSON
I'm on 46th Street, just crossing over Lyndale, when my cell phone rings.
"Steve? This is Kate from Mouthful of Bees. I just got out of the hospital, so I'm going to be about 10 minutes late."
I'm meeting Mouthful of Bees before a show at Java Jack's in South Minneapolis. There's an all ages venue tucked under the coffee shop, something I was completely unaware of as I walked in, trying to figure out where a budding young rock band could set up, much less rock out in the way that Mouthful of Bees' debut disc, The End, shows them to be capable of. But can you bring the rock with a broken toe?
"Well, I was making pancakes today and then—this is the third time I've broken this toe, mind you all," explains drummer Kate Farstad. "Then I was running to turn this water off and caught it on the edge of my fridge and it just snapped. I have to have a pin put in it tomorrow."
We're seated around a small table and Farstad has just joined her bandmates (bassist Micky Alfano, guitarist/keyboardist Mark Ritsema and singer/guitarist Chris Farstad, Kate's brother), and the conversation is quickly steered away from Kate's injury. It seems Chris and Kate have been playing together for quite a while already.
 "We've been playing together since 8th grade," she explains, "so five years. I'm 19." That's right: the median age of the band is 19, and I later discover that this is only their fifth show (maybe seventh—there's some debate), but somehow they've already managed to make a rough-hewn gem of an album. The overwhelming quality of The End is its palpable excitement—it's rambunctious and restless, brimming with an overgrown lushness and a giant amount of heart. It's a little Velvet Underground, a little Jeff Buckley, a little Arcade Fire. All of which is fairly amazing, given its decidedly offhand and humble origins.
The album was recorded over the course of five days last summer and Chris says, "It was kind of a joke almost: we were like, 'We should do an album.' And Micky's like, 'We're doing 11 songs.'" Chris wanted to do eight, but Kate explains they only had five at the time, so a lot of stuff had to get written pretty quickly. "I think we stayed up pretty much all night," continues Chris.
They enlisted Ritsema's brother, Davis, to silkscreen the covers of 200 copies and then threw a little release show in the basement of Java Jack's. "Like, 80 people came," says Kate, "and we made back enough to pay for the silk-screening and then we had $100 profit. We sold 'em for $5, I think. Then we just gave the rest away."
And that was pretty much going to be that, except that Ritsema also plays in Battle Royale, and thus had the ear of Afternoon Records' Ian Anderson. It took some prodding, but eventually Anderson got to hear them when they opened for his band, One for the Team, at the Triple Rock. He signed them up shortly after, and now the label has re-released The End, making it possible for journalists like me to start salivating all over them in print.
It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that makes Mouthful of Bees so compelling, but listening to any of the first four songs on their album should be enough to convince you there's something there. "The Now" breaks in with cacophonous drums and a hesitating dual guitar line before Chris' quavering voice enters, singing lyrics about a novel and the space between houses that get half-swallowed by a contrapuntal guitar melody. The song advances and retreats several times before boiling over at about the two-and-a-half minute mark, and from there it's a breathless run to the finish. "Jessica" downshifts into a gentle coast, albeit one with enough slightly strange twists (squelchy keyboard runs, resonant bass frequencies that give it an odd contour) to make it fit comfortably before "Under the Glacier," which explodes in an almost arrhythmic way before settling into a rusty, shaky groove. The song climaxes with a spiky, frenetic coda that gives way to the song I've been pimping pretty much endlessly since I first heard it, "I Saw a Golden Light," a choice which comes as a bit of a shock to the band.
"We were so wigged out when you picked it because everyone hates that song," laughs Kate. They've been unable to duplicate its sound live, and now I know why. "The drums were recorded with the internal mic in a laptop," says Chris, and I'm flabbergasted because, frankly, they sound incredible, like the drums at the end of the world or something. "I don't know how it got that way," he continues. "We've tried to figure out how to play it live. I have never found a mix I've been satisfied with."
True to form, there's no "I Saw a Golden Light" in the set they play that night. The basement of Java Jack's has been turned into the kind of venue I remember fondly from college; all Christmas lights and street signs and folding chairs. The sound leaves a lot to be desired—vocals are all but absent, and Chris' overwhelmingly fuzzed-out guitar seems like almost too much for the room to take. The first couple songs are clattery and unfocused, but when "Jessica" emerges in a slightly different arrangement from the record, propelled by an endearingly funky new drumbeat, it all begins to fall into place. I have to confess: I'm stumped for an adequate way to describe their fuzzy, lo-fi charm as other than the way it felt at that moment: magical.
When my friends and I are playing basketball, we like to mock sports commentators for saying that NBA draft prospects as have "tremendous upside," but that's pretty much what Mouthful of Bees have: upsideability. And so I sit in the basement of a coffee shop, wondering if I might not just be witnessing the beginning of something really huge, when I notice that Kate's still got her hospital admit bracelet around her right wrist—you just can't teach that kind of heart. ||
Mouthful of Bees play a kind of unofficial CD Release Show for The End on Sat., Jan. 6 at the Triple Rock Social Club with We All Have Hooks for Hands, Target Market, One for the Team and Hockey Night. 9 p.m. $8. 18+. 629 Cedar Ave., Mpls. 612-333-7499. For more information on Mouthful of Bees, check out their MySpace page at myspace.com/mouthfulofbees.
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