Dorks And Losers

Los Ange­les indie duo The Bird And The Bee sure does like mak­ing music, releas­ing its sec­ond EP One Too Many Hearts after hav­ing already released the EP Please Clap Your Hands mere months after the band’s self-titled debut album hit the store shelves. The band (Inara “Bird” George — vocals, Greg “Bee” Kurstin — pro­ducer, gui­tar) just has too much cre­ativ­ity, although this lat­est release did have some­thing to do with a lit­tle hol­i­day called Valentine’s Day.

I think part of the duo’s charm is its sim­plic­ity. The two have an abil­ity to chan­nel the pure and uncom­pli­cated feel­ings of ado­les­cent love. The open­ing track “Birth­day” (lis­ten here) tells the story of true affec­tion, unclut­tered by the com­plex­i­ties of adult rela­tion­ships. The lyrics repeat like a poem might and impress like flow­ers and a box of choco­late still do.

Don’t let Kurstin’s dreamy pro­duc­ing skills fool you. There’s still a tra­di­tional roman­tic sen­si­bil­ity under­neath the com­bi­na­tion of the funky rhythms and George’s hush and lush vocals, as in “The Last Day of Our Love” with the lyrics “On the first day / Of our love / You brought me incense and a flower.”

But the Bird and Bee do man­age to main­tain a lit­tle bit of real­ity, as in “Come As You Were” with its fran­tic whirl­wind of emo­tions and feel­ings (“Blow down a sky­scraper / Fill up your pock­ets / Fill up your nerves / Fall up into my arms / Give me a love and set off alarms”). You all remem­ber the care­free excite­ment when any­thing and every­thing seemed pos­si­ble and prob­a­ble, don’t you?

In a way, every stage of romance is cov­ered in this brief four-song EP. I’m exag­ger­at­ing because we all know there’s only one stage of romance and that’s sex, right? The con­clud­ing track “You Belong To Me” ful­fills that lat­ter truth. It’s a cover duet between George and Gus Seyf­fert and lines like “Lay down way down along the stream / How very very sweet it will seem” are as implic­itly erotic as they get. The New Yorker said it best when it called The Bird And The Bee a “sure delight.”

[photo via Flickr]
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Track list:

1. Birth­day
2. The Last Day Of Our Love
3. Come As You Were
4. Tonight You Belong To Me

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