Bees Free The Bees

The Bees debut, Sunshine Hit Me was a fantastic outsider for the Mercury Music Prize almost three years ago now. I'd kind of forgotten about the band, so much so that I'd used them as an example of groups who fail to follow up promising debuts and then disappear into obscurity. Free the Bees, however, shows the Isle of Wight's greatest export since Matthew Le Tissier growing and expanding their musical range in unexpected and delightful directions.

Our era, one that the Bees try there best to shun throughout this work, is intriguing in that digital technology allows us access to almost any form of art ever produced. Whereas the Seegers, or Woody Guthrie, spent years collecting folk songs, like beardy Walter Scotts, and the modernists had access only to acknowledged classics, bands like the Bees have whole new canons of musical milestones. The danger from this is the LP version of the Shoreditch DJ, those tragic David Holmes imitators, pulling out breaks so recherché as to be pointless. It's both obscurantist - look at my rare 60s soul track - and hopelessly populist at the same time - you too can be a DJ.

What's interesting then is to take these sort of alternative canons - 50s soul and proto rock 'n' roll, 60s Phil Spector production and psychadelia, early punk classics, and so forth - and take it somewhere interesting. The debate about music being derivative is frankly redundant; today's cutting edge music - I use the term with reservations - very often sounds like Kraftwerk or Eric Satie. Remember, the most Post-modern novel ever written is surely Don Quijote . And if punk was some sort of year-zero for music, how comes Anarchy in the UK has wall-of-sound production?

What the Bees do is go back to the source, in an impossibly collectorish, messy way, a kind of post-Benjaminian junk shop time travel, to recreate perfect, jewelled period pieces, all imbued with style, fun, and, I suspect, a shitload of drugs. So it's as joyous and energetic as The Byrds, Love, or Paperback Writer. The coral reef would be Athlete, but the Bees sail much closer to the Beta Band's oceans, with a similar level of coherence - strange, I own - to their Scots cousins' recent long player.

I suppose it's important not to get too carried away - this is one of those distinctive "albums of the summers". It's not going to change the musical horizon, as there's absolutely nothing new here. But the oldies - the hilarious Chicken Payback, the beautiful 50s ballad I Love You, or the exuberantly wonderful One Glass of Water - are strong enough to make this both a worthy successor and a promise for the future.