The Bird and the Bee - Ray Guns are not Just the Future

Given the previous post, it’s an amusing coincidence that the first album of 2009 that I’ve fallen for is one with a single called “Love Letter to Japan” (try to ignore the rubbish video). For a love letter it doesn’t actually say that much lyrically about Japan, beyond the the ‘patience and the peace/cherry blossoms and the candy’, but their musical retro-futurism and a certain sense of reserve do also point to what they might have been able to find to their liking there.

The Bird and the Bee's is a sort of dance-twee-pop sound built on trip-hop like beats, crackly string samples and minimalist instrumental interjections. On top of this you get Inara George’s soft and rather mannered vocals, frequently lent emphasis by being doubled (or tripled) up. At times, Ray Guns sounds about half way between the two models of Goldfrapp, but more often than that it sounds a lot like “They” by Jem. This is a good thing, given that “They” is one of the most mystifyingly great one-offs to have graced the charts recent years.

The comparison is clearest of all on playful album highlight “Polite Dance Song”, where the aforementioned reserve is put to use. Inara’s repeated ‘pardon me’s and ‘apologies, apologies’ multiply and swirl round her as she tries and doesn’t quite succeed in living up to the title. Those repeated apologies actually give even more of a sense of the loss of control and irresistibility of the urge to dance than the sweeping rise of ‘da-da-da-da-da-DA-DA’ that eventually overpowers do.

I’d previously come across The Bird and the Bee through their “Because” being a free single on iTunes. One aspect aside it was quite a good song, but I didn’t really remember that until going back to it now, thanks to that aspect being their failure to correctly distinguish the words ‘prostrate’ and ‘prostate’, a mistake that rendered it unlistenable as soon as spotted. They’ve fortunately avoided dropping any such clangers this time on an album that’s lightweight but very charming from start to finish.