Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree turn rage into something quieter on “In Between Strides”

If it wasn’t for the pumpkin spice latte I was holding while I listened to this, I would have filed “In Between Strides” under late summer: one of those evenings where the sun takes its time going down and nobody’s in a hurry to go inside.

Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree has been a four-piece from Stuttgart since 2014, with the same four people in it the whole way. The name is lifted half as a joke from Earth’s “The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull”. Their fourth album arrives on 18 September via Magnetic Eye Records. Coming out of “Aion” (2023), the one thing they decided in advance was to go more melodic.

The band tracked songs wherever they happened to be: a cellar, a concert stage, an indoor balcony, a living room, their rehearsal space, and the studio where they recorded their debut “Medicine” back in 2017. Where “Aion” ran to eight tracks and the better part of seventy minutes, this one is five, and it feels like a record that has stopped trying to fill the room.

Right from the first song, you get these mellow notes that cuddle you almost into a hug while keeping you in suspense. The build of “Departure” is what rage might sound like if it weren’t held to the aggressive stereotype. Its colour is full of details that only come out with headphones on, and I spent a while trying to work out which song came from which room. I never did.

Once you get past minute seven, the guitar entering acid like an echo in an empty room is exactly what that silent rage looks like to me. Simon Weinrich (guitar, vocals) has said “Departure” was the first song written for the album and by far the most trouble. It stands as an example of how hard the band found it to work out where to go after “Aion”. You can hear the wrestling in it, and I mean that as a compliment.

If “Departure” is silent rage, then the four minutes of “Respite” and its acoustic guitar felt like an interlude pointing at something else. In a way I was right. The three songs that follow are classic shoegaze, and they give you goosebumps. I love how the bass line sits almost higher than the guitars, that rounded sound pushing against the dirty distortion, with the airy vocal floating over the top of it. “Clutching at Straws” is a breath of fresh air, with the vibe of certain 90s songs, the ones you listen to driving down a long road late at night or early in the afternoon.

“Elisa” and, above all, “Return, Precipice” left me speechless. The vocal on “Return, Precipice” felt like a siren echoing across a large empty space, the concert stage maybe. Then the instruments tend to disappear around minute seven, only to come back heavier than before. When I say heavy, I mean set down to the floor, heavy enough that you feel you should lie down or kneel. By the time I got to the end, I was left with a sense of emptiness and fullness at the same time, almost as if this chapter was incomplete and part of a bigger one.

Whatever the intention behind this album was, what I got from it is a road down memory lane, one that had me remembering things I’d forgotten and the emotions attached to them.

Tracklist:

1. Departure
2. Respite
3. Clutching at Straws
4. Elisa
5. Return, Precipice