This is the second premiere from Buzzard‘s new album, Mean Bone (review here), to be posted on this site, and it comes with some context. I know. The c-word. Sigh. Just bear with me.
If you click that link, you’ll see that in the review, I said the record ends with a song called “Sorrow, Terror and Evil,” a heavy and lumbering culmination of the statement in doom that Buzzard‘s lone denizen, Christopher Thomas Elliott (also of the folk duo Austin and Elliott and various other solo works), was making throughout the songs prior. Cool way to end a declarative second full-length from Elliott‘s project, the only trouble is that’s not how the record actually ends.
Oops.
To be fair, that song is real and was on the version of Mean Bone that I got to review, it just got crossed up between the album being done and the other premiere being slated, hearing the thing, etc. As clerical errors go, it could be far worse. But once I heard it, I did want to write about “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” because it changes on the level of persona the way Mean Bone finishes. It’s not at all an apex of the heavy riffage that rolls out in other songs. It’s a decidedly quieter, more contemplative finish.
Like a lot of Elliott‘s work to-date as Buzzard and elsewhere, it tells a story. Folk balladry, as a form, is crucial to how the material is framed — think of songs like “Murder in the White Barn,” which tells a troubling tale of its own through dialogue, and “Flies, Mosquitos, Rats and Sparrows,” which recounts a Chinese famine resulting from Great Leap Forward-era ecosystem tampering — and “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century” isn’t his first foray into incorporating science-fiction as part of that.
To story, put succinctly below, is that far-future archeologists discover a mall and attempt to figure out what it’s for. Good luck. Hearing the song for the first time, I couldn’t help think of the sentient insects who evolve on Elliott‘s earlier-2025 Satiricus Doomicus Americus (review here), which I’ve been largely unable to put down, in the closing track “Cockroaches and Weed.” But it doesn’t seem like we know ultimately who these future entities are, only that they’re looking back and seeing how we lived through our savage age.
Elliott was kind enough to put together the lyric video premiering below for “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” and especially as Mean Bone has been out for a couple weeks now and attention spans go the way of attention spans, I appreciate the chance to give the album review an addendum and let the song stand on its own as well, since that’s how I’ve experienced it.
If you’ve never heard Buzzard, Elliott or any of it, this might not actually be a terrible place to start. Just a thought.
Congrats. You made it through the context. I hope you enjoy:
Buzzard, “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century” lyric video premiere
“Writing this song I imagined alien or human archeologists in the distant future excavating the remains of a shopping mall.” – Christopher Thomas Elliott
If Buzzard‘s first album, Doom Folk (review here), cast its own genre designation in the title, the upcoming second Buzzard LP, Mean Bone, flips that around. Not doom folk, but a ‘folk doom,’ drawing from Americana and slow, churning heavy groove in such a way as to feel like a reversal of the balance that Buzzard‘s sole auteur and denizen, Christopher Thomas Elliott, portrayed on the first record less than one full year ago.
And yeah, all this narrative about “first record” and “second record” when it comes to Buzzard is complicated by the release in January of Satiricus Doomicus Americus (review here), a largely-heavy, sample-laced and frankly brilliant examination of the current sociopolitcal moment, issued by Elliott under the eponymous guise of Satiricus Doomicus Americus and filtering its perspective through story and metaphor in a way that the 13 tracks and not-a-minor-undertaking 55 minutes of Mean Bone expand upon in multiple directions.
For example, “Conclusions,” which isn’t the last track but drops to acoustic guitar and ties directly with “Too Many Humans” from Satiricus Doomicus Americus and is a lyrical complement, but prior single “Crushing Burden of Despair,” the opener/current single “Darkness Wins” (premiering below), the chugging “Primitive” and “Changeling” are more about outward impact and feel freer to explore lyrically. “Changeling,” in particular, is parental in its point of view despite ending in murder, and actually “Murder in the White Barn,” following the initial salvo of “Darkness Wins” and “Crushing Burden of Despair” — maddeningly catchy, blindsiding in tone if you heard the debut and don’t know hard riffs are coming — ups that body count as well. Can’t have modernity without at least a little wanton killing, it seems.
In his propenity for shifting arrangements, clear singing voice and his foundation in folk and Americana, Elliott calls to mind an isolated David Eugene Edwards, perhaps if 16 Horsepower had felt their way through as a solo-project. But here, on Doom Folk and on Satiricus Doomicus Americus, the recording is part of the character of the listening experience. Elliott‘s voice is often layered but rarely enough drenched in effects to make the repetitions of “I bite my tongue/I bite my tongue…/Until I spit it all out” amid the pointedly Mars Red Skyian fuzz of centerpiece/highlight “Twisted Love” genuinely stand out.
Against a backdrop of probably-programmed drums and a sound that’s raw enough to be called organically digital — that is, it sounds like it was made on a laptop and it’s not trying to pretend that laptop was a million-dollar studio. I’m pretty sure it’s not AI, but it’s not like I was there when it was made, and if you asked me to prove I’m also not AI to you at this point, I couldn’t. Regardless, Elliott‘s homemade-feeling penchant for hard rhymes in thoughtful lyrics tells the decidedly human story of “Ghost of Orphan James,” become moodier and more creepingly malevolent to suit the cruelties described, even grimmer than “Murder in the White Barn,” though both songs seem to be about justice from some angle, their lyrics and those of the rest of the material made a focal point by the clarity of the vocal delivery.
Based around a bible story where a demon possessing somebody or other is cast into a herd of pigs who are then thrown into a river or some such, “Gadarene Swine” feels sincere in examining cruelty to animals in christian dogma, while “Dunwich Farm” directly pairs country blues and doom traditions, laying itself out like “Parchman Farm” to the horrors of present-day capitalist exploitation — the penultimate “Plight of the Planet” answers back with heavy-landing stomp and crash later (also the album’s title line), more specifically environmental in scope — or China’s Four Pest Campaign as depicted in “Flies, Mosquitos, Rats and Sparrows” that discounted ecology to the tune of 55 million deaths. In the song, Elliott is sure to mention they were peasants, the implication that no one cared about this ‘cost of progress’ laid bare.
It’s not all heavy-handed, but some of it definitely is, and that’s not a weakness considering how much the songs stand up to the message(s). Even closer “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” which wraps with a weirdo-key-and-distortion-backed harmony worthy of Uncle Acid repeating warnings to women about, “Sorrow, terror, evil in the hearts of all good men,” brings a moment to complement what’s come before or expand the breadth of Buzzard in some way. The album by no means works from an optimistic point of view — see “Darkness Wins,” right up front — but neither is it entirely hopeless.
In “Crushing Burden of Despair,” as Elliott brings a duly cynical view of his times in lines like, “Knuckles dragging on the ground/Creationists arch a unibrow,” when he gets to “Stare into the abyss” in a later verse, the next line’s answer back is, “The abyss stares back and blows a kiss.” Sometimes if you can’t cry, laughing is all that’s left. And if you’re curious as to why I’m so focused on the lyrics, they’re relevant. Elliott notes below in talking about “Darkness Wins” that the music, “poured forth naturally from the lyrics.” That means the lyrics were there first. I’d be surprised if much of Mean Bone wasn’t built up that way. The words have been worked on no less than the riffs, which feels weird mostly for feeling weird.
Doom Folk brought Elliott to light as a solo, mostly acoustic-based singer-songwriter working from a heavy underground — doom and stoner, classic heavy rock, etc. — influence and bringing that forward alongside Americana and darker folk craft. Not the first to unite those worlds, necessarily, but doing so on a basis of notably strong songwriting and nascent persona. Mean Bone skillfully reinterprets this formula and claims new stylistic ground for Buzzard as a project, opening new possibilities — would/could an actual full-band happen? live if not in the studio? — while showing that the impressive 2024 outset was no fluke and, in combination with Satiricus Doomicus Americus, representing an expressive voice that seems to be disovering new moments of realization as it goes. There are plenty of them here, and if the quick turnaround on this second LP is an indicator that more are on the way, fair enough. That’s Buzzard offering a bit of hope as well, maybe.
Enjoy “Darkness Wins” below, followed by more from the PR wire:
Buzzard, “Darkness Wins” lyric video premiere
Christoher Thomas Elliott on “Darkness Wins”:
“Darkness Wins” is a response to the optimistic statement made by Detective Cohle at the end of True Detective, Season 1: “If you ask me, the light’s winning.” Actually, no, it is not.
In his essay “Through a Ligottian Lens: Session 9 and True Detective,” weird fiction author Jon Padgett discusses how the HBO series incorporates the cosmic pessimism of Thomas Ligotti into the monologues of Matthew McConaughey’s character, who spouts passages nearly verbatim from Ligotti’s anti-natalist treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. However, despite the show’s pervasive bleakness, the final episode betrays its Ligottian nihilism with a pat whodunit conclusion in which our heroes nab the “Scooby Doo villain,” as author Laird Barron quips. Hope is rekindled, however tentatively.
But the song is here to remind us, sorry, my friends. Darkness did, does, and will prevail.
Besides Padgett’s essay, another inspiration for the song is Brandon Trenz’s artwork for the Chiroptera Press edition of Michigan Basement: the ghostly carnival, the oppressive darkness, the raw dread. The music of “Darkness Wins” poured forth naturally from the lyrics, made easy by a lifetime listening to Sabbath, Candlemass, and Trouble.
Injecting more metal into the malevolent Americana of Doom Folk, Buzzard’s 2nd LP Mean Bone aims to define the modern singer/songwriter doom genre. Created by Christopher Thomas Elliott, the 13 tracks traverse extremes of haunting beauty and brooding heaviness. Sabbathian riffs meet traditional folk songs in tales of depraved zealots, mad tyrants, and avenging ghosts.
Unlike Doom Folk, which was composed mainly on a handmade Alan Carruth acoustic guitar, Mean Bone was written mostly with an Ibanez electric guitar sporting a Cattle Decapitation sticker. Influenced by classic Doom and Americana, the music of Mean Bone ranges from crunchy metal to creepy folk. Informed by socially conscious Weird Fiction and Dylan-esque songwriting, the lyrics lament the evils of religion, the cruelty of mankind, and the plight of the planet.
Mean Bone was written, performed, and produced by Elliott in his lean and mean home studio, dubbed Inscrutable Studios for its tangled wires and eldritch gear.
Tracklisting: 1. Darkness Wins 2. Crushing Burden of Despair 3. Murder in the White Barn 4. Primitive 5. Changeling 6. Ghost of Orphan James 7. Twisted Love 8. Gadarene Swine 9. Dunwich Farm 10. Flies, Mosquitoes, Rats, and Sparrows 11. Conclusions 12. Plight of the Planet 13. Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century
With the stated intention of bridging gaps between traditionalist folk and doom Massachusetts-based Christopher Thomas Elliott made his debut operating under the Buzzard moniker earlier this year with the aptly named full-length, Doom Folk (review here). If you missed it among the glut of 2024 offerings in various styles under the umbrella of ‘heavy’ microgenres, you might be forgiven. There’s been no great hype push, no social media content-providing to keep the songs in listeners’ algorithms. It’s almost like they just want to make and release music without having to hock wares in the open market of Reels. Imagine such a thing.
“Crushing Burden of Despair,” a new Buzzard single posted the other day, is outwardly heavier than was most of Doom Folk, though the album featured electric guitar along with acoustic as well. Here, it comes with dense bass and a swing of drums — programmed or not, I can’t tell — heralding more of a band-ish arrangement as a preface to a second long-player to come early next year, given the title Mean Bone. What’s held over is the groove and Elliott‘s plainspoken lyrics and singing style, and while based on Doom Folk, I wouldn’t expect Mean Bone to do just one thing the whole way through however many tracks it ultimately will boast, it’s plain to hear Buzzard laying claim to a broader scope of sound in “Crushing Burden of Despair” even as much of the personality of the album before is maintained in the track, which — you guessed it — is about living in America right now. So, yes, daring to be relevant amid an evolving sound. This tells me the record is something to look forward to.
In the interim, Doom Folk is getting a new, limited, bonus-track-inclusive CD pressing set to become available on Halloween — it’s October now, apparently — and the album itself has been remastered for the occasion. I’d be curious to hear that, and I would expect either way it’s still pretty raw, as that was part of the intent behind the recording in the first place. But if Mean Bone — as in the adage, “I don’t have a… in my body” — is going to delve into protest-doom as it evolves from out of the Americana bent of the first record, building on what I’d consider one of this year’s best and quirkiest debuts in new ways, count me in. I dig the hell out of this.
Lyric video follows here, and the Doom Folk stream is at the bottom of the post. Enjoy:
Buzzard, “Crushing Burden of Despair” lyric video
Greetings Doomcampers. I’m pleased to announce the Doom Folk Deluxe Expanded CD, due to lumber forth at the end of October:
* 12-track Doom Folk album freshly remastered * 4-page booklet packed with Doom Folk lyrics * 7 bonus tracks of pre-Buzzard dark Americana, including a grim rewrite of “O Death” with Lisa Austin on vocals. * Limited to 100 copies * Shipping 10/31/24
In the meantime, I just quietly slipped out a lyric video preview of the just-about-finished 2nd Buzzard LP, Mean Bone, due Spring of 2025: www.youtube.com/watch?v=68te6DhUM6c. Built around themes of human evil, social collapse, and environmental destruction, Mean Bone expands on morbid Americana to include brooding full-band Doom and Stoner metal.
