Day 78. Friday.

The Airfields:  Well, I always dreamed of releasing these (some) of the songs that are part of the “Home is Always an Imaginary Place EP” on Bandcamp. I loved The Airfields and was lucky to release a 3″ back in the day. Their music was precious. Amazing really.  So here you’ll find two original songs and two covers (The Field Mice, My Bloody Valentine). Great to hear from the Toronto combo again.

Names for Pebbles: Another blast from the past on Bandcamp is this retrospective compilation by the New Haven, Connecticut, band. The bedroom pop project of Joey Maddalena released songs between 1993 and 1998 including 7″s on Motorway and Black Bean and Placenta. Here they are all (I hope). So definitely give it a check. I would love to interview them now that there is an easy way to contact them. So I’ll try that.

Herlights: this cool Russian project is back with a new digital single titled “Stockholm Syndrome”. Chiming guitars, elegant melodies, and very fuzzy, sort of hidden, vocals, make this a wonderful song.

Free Ice Cream: Rose Melberg fans from Atlanta Free Ice Cream have recorded a self-titled album and it is a lot of fun. There are 11 songs that pack DIY attitude, quirky lyrics, twee melodies and girl/boy vocals. Some songs are better than others, and some are hits in their own right like “Holland 1986”.

ユワ: this dreampop bedroom Japanese musician from Saitama is quite an interesting discovery. Especially the last song he has published titled “エンプティ・エイプリル” is quite good!

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I was remembering some cool bands from the time I started Cloudberry. Bands that I got in touch with and for a reason or another we never worked together. One that came to mind were The Bumblebees from Bristol.

At some point I think they were playing many of the cool indiepop gigs in London, Bristol, and probably other cities. I remember seeing them in posters and flyers alongside many bands that liked and many bands I would end up being friends with. But I wonder how I discovered them? Maybe because the fine Big Pink Cake club night invited them to their gigs in Bristol? Matthew had very good taste, so that could have been possible.

The Bumblebees wouldn’t be exactly classic jangly indiepop. They were the fun kind, with a punkish attitude. A bit of Tullycraft playfulness thrown in there. But I liked them. Though I don’t think I was ever lucky to see them play live.

As far as I know they only released one CDR. It is not even listed on Discogs, but I could find it on Bandcamp. It was self-titled and included four songs. Surprisingly you can still order a copy of it! Wow. Though it does look like a re-release of the original 2008 CDR. This new re-release was put out by a local label called Local Kid and features new art in 2010. How did the first version of this release look like? Who remembers?

The EP comes with four songs, “My Kaleidoscope”, “Fluffy Clouds of Joy”, “Internal World” and “Cool Science”.

The band was formed by Rosalind Glennie on vocals and keyboards, Ellis Jones on vocals and guitar and Daniel Howard on vocals and drums. The band started as such in November of 2007. Question then, had they been in other bands previously? A small bio on last.fm tells us that the band was actually working on a debut album that was to be released by Local Kid too. What happened to that?

The band also had a Myspace. That was how I contacted them most probably. There I find that the band had at least another song called “The Way”.

The only other place I found information was on a Twitter they used to run (last post dates from 2013). Here I found a bunch of notices of gigs mostly, at places like The Cube Cinema (Bristol), Fuel (Manchester), Wheatsheaf (Oxford), Buffalo Bar (London) and more. More importantly they played 2011 Indietracks.

And so Indietracks interviewed them that year. Thanks to that we know that the three members must have moved from Bristol as they say at that time, 2011, they were in Bristol, Oxford and Staines. And then something… it mentions that the band canceled their gig at Indietracks that year and were replaced by the Sock Puppets. What happened?!

It seems they disappeared. Were they involved in other bands afterwards? Did they finish recording that album? Are there at least any more songs recorded? Who would know? Maybe some Bristol indiepop fans? I look forward to hearing what happened to The Bumblebees!

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Listen
The Bumblebees – My Kaleidoscope