Some music just isn’t made for mass consumption. That’s not the intent of the band or the result of the output. Harrisonburg, Virginia, duo Buck Gooter are a band who seem to delight in the aurally unpleasant, teaming jangly guitars with abrasive electronics as the two alliterative members, Billy Brat and six-stringer Terry Turtle, take turns yelling into the microphone. The self-released Beyond the Rotting Leaf is Buck Gooter’s 12th (!) album, and at 10 tracks/32 minutes, I find in listening that while the songs have a certain demented charm, that doesn’t exactly make the record fun to listen to.

But hey, it’s not supposed to be fun to listen to. That’s the fun of it!

One might liken some of the nonsense Buck Gooter get up to on a song like “I Wait for the Eagle” to the earliest Assjack demos, at least in terms of raw performance and production, but Buck Gooter is a duo that sounds like a duo. Even when the drum machine is in full swing and the vocals are screaming the madness of “A Million Years,” the listener is still well aware of the minimalism in the sound. Beyond the Rotting Leaf doesn’t sound fleshed out sonically. It doesn’t sound complete. It sounds post-modern, and angry, and unfriendly. It sounds like it wants to annoy you, even the cleaner vocals of earlier cut “Holy Water” seeming to poke and antagonize the eardrum.

Respite comes late in Beyond the Rotting Leaf with the track “Snakes are Cool,” a more sedate piece led by Turtle’s delay pedal, but even that “respite” is relative. Buck Gooter, 12 albums into their career, have come to embody the notion of the endurance test or the litmus against which the line between weird and intolerable is drawn. I don’t mean that as a gripe against the band or the album – it’s what they’re going for. One doesn’t make a record like Beyond the Rotting Leaf by mistake, sending it to corporate radio stations thinking it’s going to be a hit (unless you’re either clueless or insane, which I don’t think these guys are). A band like this is almost a self-contained unit. They’re going to do what they do regardless of norms, common aesthetics and production value. It’s commendable, in a way, because there’s clearly a strong creative will at work in Billy Brat and Terry Turtle, but again, that has nothing to do one way or the other with listenability.

It’s a select – very select – few who are going to be able to make it through Beyond the Rotting Leaf and come out of it on the other end with a smile on their face. I know I certainly had a hard time with Buck Gooter, but the challenging nature of the band is also one of their greatest assets. Be ready for some painful listening, and if you’re feeling brave or ripe for self-punishment, approach Beyond the Rotting Leaf with due caution and open mind.

Buck Gooter’s website

Buck Gooter on MySpace

Tags: Buck Gooter, Harrisonburg, Unsigned bands, Virginia

This entry was posted on Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.