Friday Full-Length: Lord Buffalo, Tohu Wa Bohu
This one’s been bugging me. On three separate occasions around the time of its 2020 release, I professed an affection for Lord Buffalo‘s second LP, Tohu Wa Bohu. There was the announcement they’d signed to Blues Funeral Recordings, which came with the title-track premiere, a subsequent release date/tour announcement and the unveiling of a live video for “Dog Head” that coincided with the week the album came out. And it was true each time, but I never really felt like I gave Tohu Wa Bohu — the follow-up to the band’s 2017 self-titled debut and a handful of prior short releases dating back to their 2012 self-titled debut EP — its due.
Why not? Timing, mostly. There are only so many hours in a week, a month, and I burn through them at a pretty significant clip. But it’s also the depth of this record, like the space between the piano and the violin on “Dog Head,” or the absolutely-album-defining key stomp of “Wild Hunt,” the dare-to-slow-dance progression of “Heart of the Snake” with its organ like a theremin and the urgency of noise in the subsequent finale “Llano Estacado No. 2,” an apparent sequel to a track from the four-piece’s 2019 split with Ester Drang. Across longer songs like opener/longest track (immediate points) “Raziel” (7:00) and the later, Velvet Undergroundy “Kenosis” (6:58), guitarist/vocalist Daniel Jesse Pruitt, guitarist/organist Garrett Hellman, violinist Patrick Patterson and drummer/percussionist Yamal Said dig low into Americana soil, finding room to commune in influence with the likes of All Them Witches or explore a resonant atmosphere worthy of earliest Wovenhand. Tohu Wa Bohu is the kind of record that doesn’t need to be heavy — that is, to crush you over the head with lumbering fuzz riffs, etc. — in order to be heavy.
For an example, the aforementioned “Dog Head” works handily, with its initially cast-off feel. It’s too active to be cinematic, too evocative to not be, but its jazzy approach makes it all the more stunning when the full breadth of the song kicks in circa 1:45 into the total 3:49, giving Crippled Black Phoenix a run for their melancholy while holding to the Western US folk traditionalism at its foundation, Pruitt‘s voice rural more than country, but with a drawl that gets buried amid howling lead guitar and a swell that you almost don’t realize is rising until you’re under it. Then it ends, sub four minutes. Immediately prior, “Halle Berry” is a different kind of groove, with some relative swagger behind its rhythm and a catchy repetition of “Say hallelujah” — get it? — that never quite tips over to sleaze but isn’t far off as the distortion enters the fray in the second half and whatever prayers made are answered in noise, which clears like fog for a second ahead of the ending. These two cuts together showcase a decent amount of Tohu Wa Bohu‘s reach, and beget the title-track, translating from Hebrew as “formless and empty” and coming from both a Godspeed You! Black Emperor EP cover and the book of Genesis, which functions essentially as a linear forward build but seems nonetheless to work on the flanks, looping around the sides to come at you rather than an all-out frontal assault.
Not everything is so subtle, of course. The key strikes in “Wild Hunt” certainly get their point across, and so too the chanting apex of “Tohu Wa Bohu,” or the manner in which “Llano Estacado No. 2” uses its atmospheric approach to interpret a place through experimentalist sound. Ultimately it is the dynamic on which Tohu Wa Bohu thrives, as Lord Buffalo lure you into turning the volume up with a quiet stretch and then actively turn that on its head with either a gradual or sudden shift to louder sounds. It’s not quite misdirection, but close enough to be called a kind of magic, and while Lord Buffalo are hardly the first to practice it, they do so with a genuine sense of character and mood.
You may have noticed if you’ve been reading reviews lately here — and if you haven’t, it’s fine — I’ve been thinking a lot about how a record acts to build a world of its own to inhabit. Lord Buffalo‘s Tohu Wa Bohu, whether it’s paying homage to the desert or not with its formless emptiness — the story it comes from in the Torah is about the world falling empty because of a wrathful god — captures an expanse gorgeously throughout its eight-song/40-minute procession, the band beginning “Raziel” by communicating their intention toward engulfing their audience in this vision of a place. Maybe it’s Texas. There’s enough of it down there so that’s a fair guess. Maybe it’s somewhere in one or the other of the Dakotas. Maybe it’s nowhere real, like a landscape painting done from memory. I don’t know.
But Tohu Wa Bohu succeeds at being place-evocative in a way that few in any kind of heavy Americana sphere could hope to be, whether one thinks of the band’s heavy psychedelic expanse here as an answer to the likes of the already-mentioned All Them Witches — Pruitt‘s vocals on “Raziel” and periodically throughout bring to mind that band’s Charles Michael Parks, Jr. — or a group like Across Tundras, who, in playing directly off Earth‘s mid-’00s impulses helped craft a subgenre, the central work they are doing is to make it their own. It is in the headphone-ready details of the arrangements throughout as well as in the overarching impact of the atmosphere harnessed by those arrangements that Tohu Wa Bohu is so individually defined.
Lord Buffalo have played fests like Monolith on the Mesa — where my understanding is they made quite an impression — and hither and yon, but Tohu Wa Bohu, with the backing of Blues Funeral, was something of a moment of arrival for the band, or at very least notice served of an arrival still to come. That thought puts a fair amount of pressure on their next record, but as established as the tenets of their sound feel, there’s nothing in Tohu Wa Bohu to indicate Lord Buffalo have any interest in settling sound-wise, and their songwriting is masterful enough to make me think that, yes, it would be a choice on their part.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Easy morning. Kid ate breakfast, read books, got dressed, got on the bus without much of a fight. I don’t think I got bit once, which is amazing considering where we’ve been at in the mornings. It’s all potty-training. Someday this kid will shit in a toilet. I have to keep reminding myself, like a god damned mantra. Someday this kid will shit in a toilet.
I was supposed to be interviewed by Billy Goate of Doomed and Stoned after the bus left, but Billy pushed back by an hour, so I had time to shower, eat an egg and Swiss on chaffles and do this writing. These are things I appreciate more than I can say. I’ve now showered two days in a row for the first time since I had the house to myself for the last two days of Desertfest New York. It is always these little things.
Should I be so lucky, that interview will happen in about seven minutes — unless Billy wised up and is like “this guy’s fulla crap,” but I think they’re too nice on the West Coast for that — and then I’ll probably hop back on here to finish this out.
…
So yeah, that went pretty well. Billy and I had a really good chat last year at some point, but it became less of an interview and more of like a life story thing not necessarily about music — hard to explain, but he felt he wanted to dig into his own background less and talk about writing and blogging more. I’m just about always game to run my mouth, so we were on for about an hour. He said the video would be up next week I said cool. He’s a nice guy. Very clearly a sensitive soul. It was good to talk.
Speaking of blah blah blah, there’s a new Gimme Metal show today at 5PM Eastern. Thanks if you listen.
And since I’m about 10 minutes out now from The Pecan’s bus dropping him off and introducing me to the shape my afternoon will take, I’ll leave it there. I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head and hydrate. Next week, provided Germany is generous enough to let me in their borders and I have all my “I don’t have the plague (anymore)” paperwork aligned, I’ll be covering Freak Valley Festival if not live then certainly close to it.
FRM.
Tags: Austin, Blues Funeral Recordings, Lord Buffalo, Lord Buffalo Tohu Wa Bohu, Texas, Tohu Wa Bohu
