The grooves of summer are evident on the band’s cover of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” that also serves as the album’s attempted creed and title source. Despite an auspicious start, Bees misses the thing called pollen in the flower and ends up with only a buzz. For example, the Ayers’s tribute boasts snug rhythm interspersed with carefully handled guitar that loses its pleasant dominance in Joy Rose’s mannered singing. Soul music’s ethos of gospelly, gritty, and generous emotion fails to appear thereby leaving the best intentions of a cover song flat. This thud in the road of their creativity accurately forecasts a playlist of limp pickings beneath a history of golden jazzfunk that grooved heartily through Positivity, No Time Like The Future and Adventures in Black Sunshine etc. Bad vocal ideas painfully continue and the sturdiness of Jocelyn Brown’s voice flees to be replaced with waggish ululation on a sleepy version of “Always There.” Ghosts of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho soundtrack eerily precede Carleen Anderson’s melodramatic rendering of “Summer In The City.” Anderson’s previous work with the defunct Young Soul Disciples, her first solo album and earlier work with Incognito portrayed her mature instrument in better arrangements. Is it possible for a hot band to miss its own mark sometime? Yes. When they come to your town see the show but buy this release at your own risk.
