Hedvig Mollestad Trio — Bees in the Bonnet

Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen is a songwriter/musician hailing from Ålesund, Norway, and the leader of the Hedvig Mollestad Trio. The band is made up of Hedvig on guitar and vocals, with Ellen Brekken handling bass duties and Ivar Loe Bjørnstad on drums. Bees in the Bonnet is the band’s 8th studio album, and their first since 2021. Stylistically, they create a fairly unique mix of 70s style instrumental hard rock with jazz, prog and psychedelia, and they have an excellent reputation as a live band, having played concerts to enthusiastic crowds across the planet.

Bees in the Bonnet is a fairly short album, featuring six tracks with a combined length of 35 minutes.  The album opener "See See Bop" starts with a dirty 70s-style hard rock riff. It’s got a nice groove and sounds something like a slightly heavier version of The Allman Brothers. In fact, it’s pretty heavy and leans more vigorously towards a heavy metal sound. The whole band sounds tight, and Mollestad particularly gets to shine on this one with an incendiary guitar solo. "Golden Griffin" is up next, and instantly we’re transported into a more progressive musical world of odd time signatures, and you can’t help but notice the influence of prog legends Rush all over this one. The riff on this sounds like it was drawn directly from Moving Pictures outtakes. "Itta" has an almost tribal rhythm section with a heavily distorted guitar riffing over the top. Once again, Mollestad adds some fairly inventive guitar soloing over the top to give the whole song an extra bit of flavour.  The exceptionally monikered "Bob’s Your Giddy Aunt" is up next, and its initial experimental, laid back jazzy flavour gives way to something more psychedelic before Mollestad’s heavy riffage steams in about halfway through to carry the song forward into something ultimately faster and harder. "Lamament" takes things down several notches, creating a jazz-inspired piece with some delicate, clean guitar work and cool drums and bass. "Apocalypse Slow" brings the album to a noisy close, where the band finally let go and really decides to rock out. Dirty, punky, spiky guitar riffs are the order of the day here as Hedvig Mollestad lets rip with some wild guitar histrionics, while Brekken and Bjørnstad hold everything together behind her. This may be my personal favourite and wouldn’t sound out of place on a Melvins record. 

Overall, Bees in the Bonnet is an excellent slab of jazzy, proggy, acid-fried hard rock performed by superb musicians with a wonderful understanding of how to write music that is both addictive and challenging at the same time.  Once again, Hedvig Mollestad and co have produced a masterpiece of avant-garde, jazz-infused, prog/ hard rock