While it's not exactly fair to say the Bird and the Bee were born with the keys to the city in hand, it's probably safe to suggest the Los Angeles duo initially had enough connections and friends in the industry to make things at least a little bit easier. Singer Inara George is the daughter of late Little Feat singer Lowell George, while Greg Kurstin is one of those L.A. session linchpins whose name crops up in credits all over the place. If that combined background didn't earn the duo complete carte blanche, it no doubt got the group a leg up on other virtually out-of-nowhere acts.
The thing is, the Bird and the Bee didn't exactly come out of nowhere so much as evolve organically after George and Kurstin first connected when the latter was enlisted to work on the former's solo debut. The project morphed into the Bird and the Bee's eponymous 2007 bow, a generally cool (in every sense) collaboration just subversive enough to reveal the freedoms afforded by industry cachet. The unlikely success of the pair's single "Fucking Boyfriend"-- as a remixed dance hit, no less-- and some prominent song placement only further enhanced their theoretical independence.
So what have George and Kurstin drummed up with their newfound power, prominence, and (relative) fame? On album number two Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future, George's winning coo remains charmingly aloof, while Kurstin's exotic space-age jazz production has stayed decidedly eccentric. In other words, it's basically more of the same. The difference, of course, is the loss of the element of surprise. Rather than spend some of that accumulated capital and go farther afield, as with most sequels the pair has instead played it safe, if always pleasantly so.
Yet while the results are sonically impeccable, they're also only intermittently compelling. After a brief introductory fanfare (titled "Fanfare", natch), the Bird and the Bee reel us in once again with the bittersweet "My Love", which fuses cinematic sweep with playground jump-rope beats, sort of like a more street-wise Air. "Diamond Dave" immediately skirts closer to novelty, but how could any tribute to the erstwhile Van Halen singer be anything but? "What's in the Middle" maintains the pep level, featuring skittering percussion and hypnotic monotone vocals, with George's singing overlapping almost like a harmonious synth patch.
By the down-tempo sigh of a (semi-) title track "Ray Gun"-- the mix of whimsy and innocence, delivered with distracted daydream dispassion, like someone singing while staring out the window of a rocket ship-- starts to get a little cloying. And "Love Letter to Japan" is much sillier than it is clever, posing as a too-cute piece of international pop piffle, with the fluff polished to a sheen even as it half-seems to be taking the piss out of itself. The gleam of "Meteor" is equally blinding but also shockingly banal, its "shooting star" metaphor so neatly on the nose you keep waiting for a punchline that never comes.
Considering the group's breezy Brazilian leanings, it's a pleasant surprise to find that "Baby" is not the umpteenth version of the Tropicalia standard but an equally winsome beauty redolent of a bygone age, back when a dramatic spoken-word turn could be taken as anything other than camp. In fact, any group that would give a drum roll its own title and track number must be full of its share of rib-nudging in-jokes, so it would have be nice had the group lowered the mask for a track or two and let the rest of us in on them. Indeed, "Polite Dance Song" would sink under the weight of all the disaffected irony ("Would you please clap your hands?" George politely implores) were the song not so delightfully arranged, like a meeting between Fiona Apple and the Brazilian Girls. The same could be said of the 21st century update of Dixieland jazz "You're a Cad", which provides a litany of anachronistic romantic putdowns-- bounder, rogue, rascal, crook, "but still I tug at your line, I'm a fish on your hook." It's less sly than George and Kurstin make it sound, but it could be so much more.
As the disc winds down, the melodramatic "Witch" is no match for the smooth and sweet "Birthday", which percolates like the best 1970s TV theme transformed into a torch song, but the album closer "Lifespan of a Fly" turns out to be the perfect end to an album perhaps too self-satisfied with its own chilly whimsy. Here, both George and Kurstin finally get to tone things down, with George's voice no longer utilized as a breathy special effect and Kurstin's backing spare and cabaret singer suitable. The space and more tactile heartache in the track help distinguish it from what came before, where George and Kurstin seem so overly intent on providing ear-candy that they neglect to leave much in the way of soul. Like a Mojave Desert mirage shimmering tantalizingly before disappearing, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future is ultimately left little more than a string of sweet nothings, there for your fleeting pleasure. It's a pop tease.
