It sometimes pays to have different outlets for your various sonic creations. And whilst Solitary Bee’s latest single, “Last of the Romantics,” has the same level of charm and accessibility as the music made in another quarter of the same sonic hive, under the guise of It’s Karma It’s Cool, the way this song works its magic is very different.
If It’s Karma It’s Cool is excellent at making punchy yet poised power-pop; Solitary Bee is a master of restraint and understatement. This might be a largely piano-driven piece, with the bass and beat happy to take a back seat and additional sonics and mellifluous motifs merely washing and wandering through, but the piano provides all the cascading energy needed to drive the song onwards, to mesh together the lilting and the lovely.
“Last of the Romantics” is a song that reminds us that just because you are masters of your various instruments, and our sonic bees certainly are, you don’t have to constantly demonstrate the fact. Here, the trio proves its musical prowess through the levels of restraint it employs and the amount of space it leaves for air and light and atmosphere and serenity to enter. It’s called serving the song rather than the ego…something many modern musicians would do well to remember.
It’s a song that’s reflective rather than melancholic, sweet rather than sad, a sonic picture of the past as we move into different times, a celebration of better times and more gracious attitudes. The world might be turning into a less-mannered, unrefined, and shallower place, but at least we can revisit that vision of the past by playing songs like this, its beautiful nature itself questioning whether romance and refinement have indeed left us.
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