The Spirit of the Beehive @ Mohawk // Inside
Wed Jun 12, 8:00 PM - Thu Jun 13, 6:00 AM

The cover of their 2015 EP YOU AREARRIVED (but you’ve been cheated) juxtaposes the rare beauty of an urban sewer canal during sunset,with a washed-up body of a young woman sprawled peacefully beside some floating trash. The albumthat followed, 2017’s pleasure suck, explored the sick irony of pain brought on from overindulging in bliss.Its first track featured the line, “pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” and the record’s erraticnature—spontaneous shifts from flowery psych-pop into dissonant passages of grimy distortion—evokedthe discordant effect frequent substance use has on one’s psyche.Hypnic Jerks, the Philly quintet’s third full-length and second for Tiny Engines, sounds like, as frontmanZack Schwartz puts it, “the state between wakefulness and sleep.” It’s named after the involuntary musclespasms that can happen right as someone begins dozing off, a perfect feeling to compare the album’sdrowsy yet restless character to. Unlike the spiraling momentum of pleasure suck, The Spirit of theBeehive took a more grounded approach with Hypnic Jerks, though the ground they’re standing on isequally otherworldly. Dreamy is a fitting adjective, but the songs never fully slip into the peaceful yetbackgrounded character of dream-pop.Rather than an ongoing fantasy, the record has the quality of an indescribable dream fading from memoryas you slowly begin to regain consciousness. Its warped guitar tones, transcendental synths, andsmattering of eerie audio samples—most come from bassist Rivka Ravede’s old family recordings, whichSchwartz sifted through and edited together—conjure this purgatorial space between reverie and reality.An arena where their songs unexpectedly contort themselves and take on different textures, morphing inand out of one another. These tracks were initially designed to comprise a “short mixtape,” which explainsthe record’s nebulous structure. If you’re not paying close attention to the tracklist, they could easily bemistaken for one, long song.The first two, “nail I couldn’t bite” and “mantra is repeated,” are mid-paced, ethereal bops that sound like ifDonovan was informed by The Microphones. They verge on soothing, but they’re quic