Earth – The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2005)

February 26, 2024

In my somewhat worthless opinion, this is where the second phase of Earth really took off. Sure, we had Hex and then Hibernaculum which reimagined some old stuff in the new style, but I feel like Earth MK2 really took off with the success and reception of The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull. The artwork by Arik Roper is a perfect representation of the sound on offer here: bright, vivid, yet with an undercurrent of decay.

Something that I will never ever forget is learning to drive around about when this album came out. I got the CD from Southern Lord’s webbed site, the version with the black slipcase (was there any other version available?). My dad would take me up onto the open roads in the Brecon Beacons in my mother’s rickety Rover 75 (maybe he secretly hoped I’d total it so that we could get a decent car instead?) and we’d have this fucking thing on the stereo as we wound our way through the mountains and trees.

“Has it not got any words in it, then?” Dad asked. He wasn’t impressed. “Not really a song then, is it?”

But yeah – if I am in the mood then Bees… is an almost perfect run all the way through. It can be a bit repetitive in parts but I guess that’s kind of the point. The only bit I don’t really like is the first half or so of “Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)”, where the guitar loop sounds like a valiumed up version of a bad polyphonic ringtone from the mid 2000s, y’know, the type of piece of shit mobile phone that you’d lose on a “night out” when you’re 15 and you’ve just necked your mate’s girlfriend on the local trainstation and then you got into a wicked nasty fight about it where nobody really landed any punches but it was enough to make you throw up the six cans of cider that you’ve drank. “Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)” sounds like the ringtone that weakly plays from somewhere in the nearby thorny bushes filled with rats and glass bottles because the fucking phone came flying out of your hoodie pocket when you were scrapping and now you have to crawl in there and get it back. So fuck you, “”Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)”.

But yeah, this album is pretty good.