Lord Buffalo Premiere “I Wait on the Door Slab” Lyric Video; Holus Bolus Out July 12
Austin, Texas, heavy Americana four-piece Lord Buffalo will release their third album, Holus Bolus, on July 12 through Blues Funeral Recordings. And as surely as one would never mistake a holus bolus for a rumpus, a ruckus or a hullabaloo, the textures of Lord Buffalo‘s sound across the record’s seven songs and 38 minutes are accordingly recognizable. If you heard 2020’s Tohu Wa Bohu (discussed here), the hard strikes of maybe-piano and low-drawl effects of “Slow Drug” will feel like an inheritor of some of that outing’s ambience, and the swing to which the band set those elements arises to sashay only after the opening title-track has reimagined Wovenhand as fronted by Nick Cave. We are grim, grey, thoroughly American gothic. Violins and violence.
Elsewhere amid the tumult, centerpiece “Malpaisano” tackles a vast dronescape that is not at all minimalist while seeming to be exactly and purposefully that, topped with Daniel Pruitt‘s All Them Witches-y musings, and “Passing Joy” brings together loose-strum acoustic ramble and bowed-string noise in a cinematic culmination that can’t help but resonate troubled times, and “I Wait on the Door Slab” (lyric video premiering below) teases folkish casualness, but is off on a build of layers upon layers in what first feels like manifest destiny trampling skulls forgotten in history’s romance but turns to a shimmer of guitar like it found Jesus meandering through the prairie because he’s always in the last place you look or so I’m told. The melody, the sweep, the underlying somehow-doom groove like the matte painting against which the grainy scene is 
portrayed — this is the stuff of thoughtful construction and meticulous detailing, maybe cynical but at least it seems to have earned that.
While there are plenty of moments throughout — to wit: the echoing lumber at the start of the penultimate “Cracks in the Vermeer,” soulful vocals soon to join — that feel obscure or perhaps intentionally vague in a way that comes across as more than the sum of their parts partly because you don’t know what the band is actually banging on, it would be a mistake to call Lord Buffalo or this encompassing Holus Bolus experimental, because by the time these songs hit your ears, the experiments have already been conducted. On a scientific level, a progression like “Cracks in the Vermeer,” or indeed “I Wait on the Door Slab” with its fuck-yes second-half heft and nigh on industrial stomp, does not hit its wash by happenstance. The sound of each cut is reasoned, plotted. And like the mix, which has enough going on to have potentially taken much longer than it probably actually did to finalize, the moody vibe of closer “Rowing in Eden” feels broader and deeper in its overarching instrumental severity than the band have yet gone; growth evident in in the vividness of the shapes and silhouettes in their fog.
As to what, if anything Holus Bolus is saying about America itself, I won’t speculate beyond basics like “dark” and “foreboding,” but that’s honestly enough in a culture that can’t stop hatefucking itself with false nostalgia en route to paved-over, luxury-rental, VC-funded obliteration masqueraded as authentic anything. Lord Buffalo aren’t trying to find redemption here, or to paint things as other than they are, but it’s not disgust that makes “Holus Bolus” shine and it’s not hopelessness that lends “I Wait on the Door Slab” such a feeling of rhythmic movement. Perhaps it is the nature of the thing to feel some hope. Perhaps it is desperate. Either way, before the oceans rightly rise to consume all of us, Holus Bolus gives an emotionalist lifeline to the lost and the weird who recognize the post-modernism for what it is — a death of gods and a call to dance. So get your shoes on and go.
Lyric video for “I Wait on the Door Slab” follows, backed by PR wire text in blue.
Please enjoy:
Lord Buffalo, “I Wait on the Door Slab” lyric video premiere
Lord Buffalo is heavy in the way that ghosts are heavy… in the way that billowing dust is heavy.
That is to say, the Austin, TX Psych-Americana band’s music impacts hard, though it seems impossible to touch. Their sound flows through us, it doesn’t invite the Pavlovian response of typical heavy rock music.
Perhaps it’s fitting then that their new album Holus Bolus takes its name from an antiquated term meaning “all at once.” It materializes instantly from the first notes of the opening title track, like a dark grey haze drawing listeners in with the band’s deft juxtapositions of droning violin, guitars, drums and vocals. It draws equally from Morricone and Badalementi as from Sabbath and Swans.
While the quartet trudges the same murky waters as dark emotive brethren David Eugene Edwards/Woven Hand, Chelsea Wolfe, Emma Ruth Rundle, Earth/Dylan Carlson, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nick Cave, etc., their creative interplay of Middle Eastern influence with a distinctly Western feel takes listeners in entirely new directions as the album envelops them.
Lord Buffalo is Daniel Pruitt (guitar, bass, piano, vocals, melodica), Garrett Hellman (guitar, sub-bass, piano, synths), Patrick Patterson (violin), and Yamal Said (drums, percussion). Holus Bolus was recorded by Danny Reisch and Max Lorenzen at Good Danny’s in Lockhart, TX. Mixed by Danny Reisch. Mastered by Max Lorenzen.
“While the making of this record feels a bit like a sleep-deprived hallucination to me,” Pruitt says. “Listening to it now, I find it strangely hopeful — there’s a kind of release that you hit in exhaustion. I think the record knew what it was after, even if we didn’t. It felt very much like the record just appeared one day, holus bolus.”
Holus Bolus will be available worldwide on vinyl, CD, and digital via Blues Funeral Recordings on July 12, 2024. Pre-order HERE: https://www.bluesfuneral.com/ & https://lord-buffalo.bandcamp.com/album/holus-bolus
TRACKLIST:
01. Holus Bolus
02. Slow Drug
03. Passing Joy
04. Malpaisano
05. I Wait on the Door Slab
06. Cracks in the Vermeer
07. Rowing in Eden
LORD BUFFALO is:
Daniel Pruitt – guitar, bass, piano, vocals, melodica
Garrett Hellman – guitar, sub-bass, piano, synths
Patrick Patterson – violin
Yamal Said – drums, percussion
Lord Buffalo, Holus Bolus (2024)
Blues Funeral Recordings on Facebook
Blues Funeral Recordings on Instagram
Blues Funeral Recordings on Bandcamp
Blues Funeral Recordings website
Tags: Austin, Blues Funeral Recordings, Holus Bolus, Lord Buffalo, Lord Buffalo Holus Bolus, Texas
