Melody Maker
May 26, 1979
A Can Of Bees
by Frances Lass
How's this for the daftest byline you've ever read: "This album is dedicated to anyone who started out as an animal and winds up as a processing unit." Apart from the primary school grammar, the sentence is as meaningless as the album itself. After all, what are animals if not the most sophisticated form of processing machines? Either I missed the joke, or The Soft Boys are not as clever as they think they are. Judging by A Can Of Bees, I'm forced to believe the latter.
Divorced from Radar, the Cambridge combo has had to release the album under their own auspices, adding three live tracks to bolster the studio cuts. It's witness to their years of slogging around the circuits that the live items, including their version of Lennon's "Cold Turkey", are amongst the most successful.
As for the rest, there's little to choose betwen them. Mixing schoolboy humour with a Reader's Digest's introduction to surrealist imagery, Robyn Hitchcock's lyrics, effusive at the best of times, are even more cumbersome when slapped against the heavy thudding of the music.
Working from a solid R&B basis, and obviously in love with the Abbey Road Beatles, the Soft Boys' music is a formless mess: its eclectic mentality is way above its actual achieved technicality.
With their fascination for the animal kingdom (crabs, flies, pigs, rats, etc.), The Soft Boys could become the David Bellamys of the art-school Rock world. What a horrible thought.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE