An aesthetic meant to appear raw but in a deliberate way is cliché at this point. It can still be done successfully, but everything from print ads to movie titles to fashion has been done in a manicured-in-earnest style. Check out a gossip blog where you’ll see a celebrity walking down the street in nondescript jeans and a basic black t-shirt. You’ll find out the ensemble costs twice what you pay in rent.

Thanks to the music blogosphere and laptop technology that makes a DIY approach to recording accessible to anyone, we’re up to our cochleae in unpolished music. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but like any ubiquitous trend, sorting through the filler to get to the worthwhile stuff can be problematic. You want to spot the people whose ripped jeans come from years of wear and tear, not from Barneys.

Singer-songwriter Julie Baenziger, under the stage name Sea of Bees, has a lot to prove. Her debut release, Bee Eee Pee, is a scant 17-minute EP that is low on production and high on emotion. But is this the beginning of an act worth following or just another open-mic act who should stay in her local coffee shop? This first impression makes me lean toward the former assessment.

The opening track, “Skinnybone”, begins with a slovenly warm-up of Baenziger repeating “I don’t need you” over some fumbling guitar work. 30 seconds in she recites a brief countdown and her rhythmic acoustic guitar kicks in. Her soft voice echoes as if she’s singing in an abandoned church that we just happened to walk into. A distorted noise reverberates at unexpected moments of the song, and the result is unsettling. It’s a cross between rattling metal and a broken organ. Her refrain of “I don’t need you but I want to” could have been played as an angry ex, but she delivers the line like a haunting ghost. It taps into the same quality that made Marissa Nadler’s Little Hells so successful earlier this year.

“Willis” is a strange highlight of the EP, but it stands out nonetheless. It has a bizarre intro that begins with Baenziger mumbling nonsense, groaning to fill the silence, and then another countdown. What follows is a surprisingly lively and bleak track driven by a lilting keyboard and hand claps. The elements for an upbeat track are there, but it’s grim from start to finish. Even if you can’t make out her lyrics, which is likely with her peculiar enunciation that resembles Tori Amos, you can still understand where her mind and heart are.

Bee Eee Pee is a lo-fi production. It started out as a demo, but ended up being an official release and a precursor to her forthcoming album. That fact aside, you would still hear a charming level of ambition in this release. It’s definitely not as complete as it could be, and the weird introduction to “Willis” suggests a little editing could help. But any lack of finesse feels more like the result of budgetary issues and not lack of vision or abilities. I suspect that some of Sea of Bees’ charm lies in this incidental approach to releasing music and that a big budget could have an adverse effect on the songs. But Baenziger has a quality in her voice and her arrangements that suggests she has too much integrity to get covered in gloss. Wherever she ends up taking Sea of Bees, I suspect it will be worth following.

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Bee Eee Pee