Persephone's Bees - Notes From the Underworld

Notes from the Underground is some damnably overzealous pop, slickly performed by Persephone’s Bees, but lacking the training necessary to balance such ambition. It’s all catchy, but since most of it’s slightly below average, this infection is more a plague than a blessing. Singer/songwriter Angelina Moysov shows plenty of promise—she uses enough of her Russian accent to make it a seductive tool, and her Russian folk-pop song “Muzika Dyla Fil’ma” is easily the best track on the album. Now if only someone could find a vaccine for her distractingly cloying pop…. Considering that producer Eric Valentine had over forty songs to choose from, this is also a pretty limited “best of” collection. There are four good songs, but there’s not much to be done for the other seven. Consider them as dimly realized lyrical and musical segues between better acts, dreck like “Queen’s Night Out” that contents itself in drowning its cultural motifs in experimentation and squanders all its build for the last 30 seconds (of a five-minute-long song). Not that this melting-pot album actually has a motif. I’m all for exuberance and experimentation, but the roots of this album are so tangled in one another that it can’t help being hit-or-miss. “Climbing” starts with a flatulent keyboard and builds through a flower-power falsetto into a banjo coda; is this country, a cheery homage to the '70s, or synth-rock? On the other hand, “City of Love,” samples glitzy carnival music and 8-bit MIDI sound and infuses it with 80s funk: the resulting shallow groove is almost hip enough to rock—if it only weren’t so annoying. This overextended release needs to scale back its efforts a little bit; the amount of modulation on this album is akin to putting strobe lights around the Mona Lisa. Persephone’s Bees either needs to switch genres, or it needs to embrace the fluff of pop. Songs like “Nice Day” and “Way to Your Heart” demonstrate competence, and even the bad songs are catchy, so get the CDC ready for the widespread success of their next infection. Notes from the Underground, though? Get a flu shot instead. [www.persephonesbees.com]