Album Review : King Buffalo - Dead Star (2020)
On July 11, the infamous Metallica v Napster Inc. lawsuit will turn twenty years old. Although Lars Ulrich was unanimously chastised for basically suing his own fans, it’s hard to begrudge him for seeing the writing on the wall before anybody else. The music industry would never recover from peer-to-peer file sharing and it’s both a good and a bad thing. While it’s become ridiculously difficult for artists to make a living, creativity has exploded in independent music. Twenty years ago, it would’ve been unthinkable for bands like King Buffalo to have a career and here they are.
They released a new album called Dead Star in March that will make you feel like blazing it up and drifting through space all at once.
If you’re not familiar with King Buffalo’s music, here’s what you need to know: they’re a heavy psychedelic rock trio from Rochester, New York with a casual disdain for conventional music structure. They sound like the bastard child of Queen of the Stone Age and Pink Floyd. The opener Red Star, Pt. 1 & 2 is a great example of them at their best. It’s a whopping sixteen minutes long odyssey through sound and time. Although it builds to an eventual climax, the song is really about building an experience through intricate textures. The trip is more rewarding than the destination.
Red Star, Pt. 1 & 2 is the only song on Dead Star that crushed conventional song structure in itself, but I don’t believe the rest of the album is a different experience. They are jagged fragments of this 40 minutes-long space monolith that gracefully orbit around the dominant piece. My two favorites are synth heavy instrumental piece Ecliptic, which reappropriates the instrument from Stranger Things nostalgia to create an experience where past and future collides and perhaps the groovy, proggy and Eta Carinae, where they really show off their atmospheric range.
King Buffalo is one of these bands who think music differently. The songs feel like they develop organically and slide one into the other like pieces of a puzzle. It’s not rare that I’ll listen to them and not notice if songs change because they’re so smoothly transition into one another. For example, Eta Carinae shifts into something completely else 4:30 minutes in. Sean McVay kicks into a killer classic rock guitar riff that builds up into a bombastic finish and really layers the experience. The band constantly plays with your expectations until you surrender and let yourself drift.
I don’t have anything negative to say about Dead Star, except that it feels frustratingly short and stunted. King Buffalo are at their best when they go crazy and create these crazy long musical experiences and I would’ve loved more of that. The song Dead Star is conventionally good, but I would’ve gladly sacrificed it for another 18 minutes monolith piece. Same for the Red Star Pt. 2 radio edit. You are psychedelic rock masters. Fucking go for it. Enough with the 3 minutes song and paint my fucking face with never-ending guitar riffs and crazy-ass storytelling.
King Buffalo are one of the greatest things born from the independent music circuit. They are as free from creative constraints as you can get and driven to reconcile the past and the future with their fractal sonic monuments. I loved Dead Star, but it really sounds like 4 songs EP more than a complete vision. It builds up and builds up and ends somewhat in a whimper. That’s why I slightly prefer their previous effort Longing To Be The Mountain, but don’t let that keep from getting your fix of psychedelic goodness. King Buffalo has given a new life to a forgotten sound.
7.8/10
