Struggle
in the Hive's self-titled debut is caught in limbo - somewhere
between adolescence and adulthood, wakefulness and sleep, joy and
sadness, hope and loss.
Primarily a two-person project of Pat Stolley (under the name B. Patric) and Jeff Konrad (under the name Nigel Jeffrey), Struggle in the Hive is a quiet, deliberately simple collection of often fragmentary songs that at first blush seem the products of inexperienced songwriters.
But on further inspection, the record's rudimentary parts, mostly through contradictions of tone, create an emotionally complex, surprisingly dynamic whole. The recording - released on the Future Appletree and Radical Turf labels - captures the gentle tension of inevitable transition, being pulled from what was into what will soon be.
This is particularly evident - even explicit - on "Summer Nights." The lyric "We're not kids / But we're far from dead" imagines a vast, promising expanse between childhood and death, as if adulthood didn't include the complications of work, family, mortgage payments, and high cholesterol. Yet that feeling is undercut by musical and vocal treatments that are wistful rather than hopeful, with subtle backing vocals adding warmth.
A reverse effect is achieved musically late on "The Sad Observers," which introduces bright piano notes after tossing off lyrical gems such as "Your busy mind is out-of-tune."
The album's opening-track chorus effectively embraces mixed feelings using easily accessible imagery: "Look out / Look up / The rain is pouring down / On to the garden." The rainy-day cliché, when paired with the garden, becomes loaded with multiple meanings and feelings. It's not advanced chemistry, but it's effective, particularly with the sense of pleased surprise in the vocals.
The album's instrumentation and arrangements are uniformly spare, and the vocal delivery - particularly from Stolley - sounds weary. The words might have come from a young poet with inspiration but an incomplete set of experiential tools with which to work. On "Postcards on the Vine," the lyric "What about the times / We felt / What about the e-mails / We spilled" could be drawn from a high-schooler's journal, yet it's followed by an evocative, fully developed image: "What about the postcards / That wilted away / Died on the vine / Before they were sent."
The lyrics have a refreshing awkwardness to them, but they manage to communicate almost because they lack polish: "Words can be tricky / They can stick to you / Stuck on your tongue / Like super-glue."
The whole affair feels nearly private, with a bedroom intimacy. The minimalist settings (mostly hushed guitars, bass, and drums, with occasional piano and cello) recall lo-fi indie-pop acts such as Iron & Wine and Cat Power.
Yet Cat Power uses sparse music to showcase her warbly, expressive voice. Struggle in the Hive does something else entirely. By using simple components to create a push and pull between states, ideas, and emotions, the band draws its power not from the words or the music, but from the space between them.
For more information about Struggle in the Hive, visit (http://www.futureappletree.com).
