POP MUSIC : Beehive’s Soft Sting : London-based, California-grown sisters coat their bittersweet songs with musical sugar but make no apologies for the message of female independence

When their first album came out four years ago, Tracey Bryn Belland and Melissa Brooke Belland--the L.A.-bred, London-based sisters who front Voice of the Beehive--consistently found themselves at the receiving end of comparisons to the leading “girl group” of the moment, the Bangles.

It wasn’t considered flattering.

The Bangles were “a boys’ band”--”They play for boys to get them excited,” Melissa declared at the time, full of young, cocky superiority. Voice of the Beehive, Tracey added in a declaration of post-feminist pride, was “a girl band for girls .”

So you’d think that the Bellands might be happy now that the Bangles have split up, if only to end that whole unsavory correlation. Not quite.

“We end up with Wilson Phillips (comparisons) now, though, so we’d rather have the Bangles, quite frankly,” says Melissa during a recent interview.

“God, they dress so badly,” Tracey murmurs. “They are the worst-dressed band. They used to wear velour, OK? Blue velour with this plastic pearl statement.”

“And the hair!” complains Melissa. “Conditioner! Have you heard of conditioner?”

Which Wilson or Phillips in particular is the hair offender in question?

“All of them!” says Tracey, mortified at the very memory. She brightens. “Have you seen my Chynna Phillips imitation?”

With this, she backs up toward the door of their West Hollywood hotel room, then rushes forward, singing, “I know that there is pain” and doing a devastatingly funny imitation of Phillips’ “Hold On” video persona--head reared back, arms straight down, chest out, with a half-skip and full pout.

The Bellands’ impressions of other bands, especially other female acts, are invariably a hoot. If they’re also invariably a little catty, the sisters might be forgiven (or might not, if you’re Bangle Susanna Hoffs or Chynna Phillips) for getting a little out of hand.

In a few hours these L.A. expatriates will play their first hometown date in three years at the Palace in Hollywood, before industry icons, family members and old high-school boyfriends. And they’re suitably giddy and nervous, laughing and screaming between sips of supposedly voice-protecting herbal tea.

At this night’s jam-packed concert, the Bellands and their three male (and English) support musicians will put on a frothy, raucous show closer in bouncy spirit to the B-52’s than to the sisters’ darker-natured purported heroines, Chrissie Hynde and Exene Cervenka. Their stage outfits tend toward the self-consciously tacky/trendy, with plenty of fluorescence and dots. It’s continents away from anything anyone might consider a vaguely serious image.

“Anything goes,” says Melissa about the band’s style sense. “Chanel No. 4 1/2--kind of almost there but not quite. Fashion is entertainment to us. We almost called our band the Fashion Don’ts, but then it became so fashionable to be unfashionable, so we decided to change it.”

The Relationship Don’ts might have been an even better name.

If Voice of the Beehive existed purely as an anti-fashion plate, there might be a certain charm involved, and if the music had nothing but its ABBA-cum-Elvis-Costello alternative-pop sheen to recommend it, that too might be enough.

But the band has much more: In the best rock ‘n’ roll tradition of undercutting difficult emotions with musical sugar, Tracey Belland’s sweetly sung, deep-cutting lyrics speak to relational issues with a unique, and uniquely female, voice full of the bittersweetness of independence. These traits all added up to make “Honey Lingers,” the group’s second collection, one of the best pop albums of 1991.

Both of the Bellands have boyfriends waiting back in London, so loneliness is presumably not high on the agenda these days. Many of Tracey’s songs, though, deal with a sort of simultaneous exhilaration and existential panic at the prospect of leaving behind bad relationships, and the price to be paid for working up that strength.

Sample lyric off “Honey Lingers,” from the KROQ hit “Monsters and Angels”:

I’m nobody’s wife and I’m nobody’s baby

I like it that way well then again maybe . . .

I’m nobody’s promise and I’m nobody’s chore

And I ain’t got nobody that I feel I gotta live for

(Nobody to live for)

Back on the first album, “Let It Bee,” in the wistful “Man in the Moon,” the sisters rhapsodized over the title character’s steadiness compared with merely mortal men (“He’s the brother I never had, the husband I’d never want”); told an ex-lover “Don’t Call Me Baby”; described “The Beat of Love” as “a nasty one,” and told stories of infidelity and regretfully lost virginity in “Trust Me” (“She’s saved it all this time / But to him it’s worth a dime”).

With these kinds of sentiments, full of romantic ideals ground into grit and a hardened attitude toward the ways of men, it’s no wonder that Voice of the Beehive has so many young women packing its shows. It also makes you wonder whether the boy contingent--which typically tends to buy records by women singers who they fantasize will seduce them, not slough them off--might be a bit more resistant to their charms.

“I’ve had a few comments: ‘What’s your problem with men?’ Often in the verses I try to replace he with she , and switch it around so you get both perspectives,” says Tracey, 29. “But even my mom said that to me the other day--’Why do you have to be so male-bashing?’ I hate that, I hate that.

“I think (the lyrics) just portray relationships. Which I have trouble with. And that’s all I’m trying to say is, both people get (messed) up sometimes. I’m not anti-male. God knows, if I were, I’d have a lot less problems in my life.”

Tracey plays down suggestions that her themes might be unusually gender-specific and uncomfortably shrugs off labels like post-feminist . Nonetheless, even just by eschewing the mechanics of sexual fantasy (of, say, the Bangles’ “In My Room” sort) for a sadder kind of romantic realism, there may be part of the audience--that is, the lusty male part--that gets left behind.

“It’s true that when you’re singing something like that, you’re taking away a little of the fantasy image,” says Melissa, 26. “But I think that what we have in place of that overt sexuality is humor.

“Just as girls put on short skirts and do that pout thing--which they’re perfectly entitled to, nothing wrong with it--for our band it’s not right. I don’t want to present myself that way. This is my job. I don’t want to be a sex symbol in my work. I want to be a sex symbol in my bedroom with my boyfriend, not day-to-day being in a band.”

Still, Voice of the Beehive’s image is hardly asexual.

“No, it’s feminine--almost in a drag queen sense,” Melissa maintains. “I’m serious. The hair goes on, the lashes, completely over-the-top frost--it almost is like a parody of femininity. And then you got the big, stompin’ Doc Martens on.

“It’s a conscious contradiction. They say, ‘If you’re gonna be in a band and want to be treated like an equal, don’t wear lacy bows and stuff, try to be hard.’ So we go out with bows on that stick out 10 feet. Make that bow statement!”

Voice of the Beehive has yet to make a major buzz nationally, remaining most rabidly popular in the two cities they’ve called home, Los Angeles (thanks to constant airplay from alternative-rock outlet KROQ) and London. Having been gone so long, returning here for local dates is especially nerve-racking.

The two grew up in Encino, daughters of Bruce Belland, a member of the Four Preps, who had a pop hit in the ‘50s with “Twenty-Six Miles.” In the teen years, Melissa, the more outgoing and probably more flamboyant of the two, went off to boarding school, where she caused a stir with her then partially red-streaked hair (it’s since gone all red); meanwhile, back home, blond Tracey was busy playing the “prom queen surfer babe” with a sideline penchant for poetry.

Eventually they reunited, discovering a common interest in following in the bootsteps of their new-wave heroines--though attempts at such in L.A. were abortive.

Tracey was first to pick up and move to London, in 1985, followed in ’86 by Melissa--with a self-conscious nod to the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, who was the primary role model for both women and who’d made a similar transatlantic jump once upon a time.

Once formed, their budding Beehive didn’t have to struggle long for attention. “The scene was so dark and gothic at the time, and being American, we came in with these flower dresses and California harmonies and bursts of tutti-frutti, with no inhibitions at all as far as what we wore and said and did,” says Melissa.

“It wasn’t only the clothes, it was the whole attitude. It stood out; amid Gene Loves Jezebel, the Damned and Balaam & the Angel, it was definitely a blast of color in there. Whether people loved us or hated us was not the point. You definitely knew that we had a band.”

The sisters remain based in London, where, they say, the relative poverty and chilly, recreational-user-unfriendly climate conspire to make it easier for musicians to concentrate on their craft.

“I was thinking about tonight’s show,” says Tracey, “and how it’s going to be weird for my friends, because I was the high school geek. I had some cool friends, but I was uncool. Now I’ve kind of exploited it to my benefit. Market that geekiness! Anyway, it’ll be funny for them, because they know me as shy Tracey that was always reading and writing in her journal in the corner . . .”

And now?

“And now I’m gonna erupt like a rock ‘n’ roll volcano , I think is the expression.”