Album Review: King Buffalo, Acheron
With Acheron, Rochester, New York’s King Buffalo continue their emergence among the most essential acts of current American heavy psychedelic rock. The first thing you hear is running water. It is the sound of the place the four-song/40-minute full-length was recorded; Howe Caverns in Schoharie County, NY. An underground stream runs alongside a path both natural and cut into the rock 150 feet under the ground, and it’s where the band — guitarist/vocalist/synthesist Sean McVay, bassist/keyboardist Dan Reynolds and drummer Scott Donaldson — tracked the album, playing the songs live with audio and video recordings running simultaneously. The trio’s original ambition to release three albums in 2021 of material composed during the tour-less lockdown of 2020 may have met with vinyl-pressing-delay circumstances beyond their control — the third in this trilogy will be out in 2022 instead — but their will to create in different locales as a part of that project has thus far been maintained.
June 2021’s The Burden of Restlessness (review here) — which shared the face-forward artwork theme with Acheron, albeit in a grimmer manifestation — was self-recorded. Acheron arrives produced by Grant Husselman, who had previously worked on their early 2020 EP, Dead Star (review here), and the prior sophomore LP, 2018’s Longing to Be the Mountain (review here), and who here was tasked with nothing less than building a mobile studio unit in a day and capturing the band’s energy in a remote setting, deep beneath the surface of the earth. As McVay‘s guitar enters over that initial water flow — which will return as an aural theme throughout the songs — his lines seem to give some shape to the movement of water over stone, Acheron is not quite 30 seconds into its opening title-track before its first victory is declared.
What unfolds gracefully from that point across “Acheron” (10:21), “Zephyr” (9:26), “Shadows” (10:35) and “Cerberus” (9:47) is an acknowledgement of who King Buffalo are as a unit that brings some of the sharper-edged progressive aspects of The Burden of Restlessness — these songs were written at the same time, after all — together with the duly fluid heavy psychedelia the band offered on Longing to Be the Mountain, their Jan. 2018 lead-into EP, Repeater (review here), or 2016’s debut album, Orion (review here).
The album feels brilliantly curated to this purpose and to its setting. The angry melancholy of “The Knocks” or “Locusts” from the prior record — looking inward and out — isn’t absent from Acheron, but the context has shifted, and even the angular chug toward the apex of “Cerberus” that feels like it’s speaking directly back to the last outing arrives with a different energy, complemented by a layered, harmonized crescendo of guitar solos over grand crashing drums and Reynolds‘ ever-steady presence in the low end.
No doubt earlier vibes like the drifting synth and guitar of “Zephyr” or the echoing breadth of “Shadows” play into that impression as well — Acheron is best taken as a whole work — but the tension that King Buffalo crafted into their material on The Burden of Restlessness can still be heard, whether it’s Donaldson‘s drumming pushing through beneath the final cascades of guitar and melodic float in “Zephyr” or the foreboding jabs of guitar from McVay as “Cerberus” makes ready to do its final battle with that mythological creature, who perhaps is acting as a stand-in for some of the same feelings The Burden of Restlessness took on. “Acheron” itself seems to build outward from that foundation — the title referring to the River of Woe in Greek folklore — and its own repetitions and builds of chugging guitar, particularly as filled out by an overarching keyboard line in the second half of the song, become crucial for understanding what Acheron, the album, is looking to accomplish.
It is not just about doing something different from the last record, or about answering the last record, or about recording in a cave. The truth of Acheron is that it is its own work. I’m not sure if “Shadows” is about Erebus or not, but “Zephyr” is the Greek God of the West Wind, and the song’s atmosphere, even solidified in the midsection and freaked-out-shred later as it is, is duly gorgeous. As much as Acheron is the second of an intended three-part collection, it’s also a fourth King Buffalo full-length, and it works no less to demonstrate the band’s live energy, yes, as well as their broadening instrumental and melodic reach, their patience in executing ambient as well as more intense stretches, and more over, their skill at creating a sonic narrative by setting the two against or alongside each other.
After its surge shortly before the four-minute mark, “Cerberus” pulls away from its final lyrics and from 4:20 on dedicates itself to an entirely instrumental movement, turning back and forth from its tense chug — which at one point stands alone in willful make-you-grind-your-teeth fashion — to lead guitar in setting up the payoff solo(s) and final epilogue riffing, which itself cuts short and echoes out at the end of the record. The motion from one part to the next is neither stark nor overly molten. Instead, it is precisely what King Buffalo want it to be. A given push from one part to the next can be a dramatic return, or it can be a setting off into unknown spaces, or it can be as simple as a shift from a verse to a chorus.
The band’s songwriting accounts for all of these, just as that first guitar line of the title-track seems to carry the rhythm of the running water, so too does the rest of Acheron play out in a series of carefully shaped moments. They may have shown up to Howe Caverns to record in a day, but that didn’t happen without having their parts refined beforehand, and the work King Buffalo put into sculpting Acheron as it is pays dividends in a front-to-back immersive listen. It is your own freight elevator down to that river, the stalactites and stalagmites and the cool moisture surrounding.
I do not know what the third installment of King Buffalo‘s plague-era trilogy might hold in terms either of atmosphere or the circumstances of its being put to tape, but as much as Acheron feels tied to The Burden of Restlessness in some ways, it no less breaks away from that album to find its own place as one of 2021’s best releases. Expectations and anticipation for their next work should be high, but Acheron underscores just how justified their audience is in trusting King Buffalo to meet and surpass their own standards, setting new ones along the way. They certainly do that here.
