Buffalows
Woe Isn’t Me
buffalows.bandcamp.com
Buffalows is Landon Strause, Brooks Strause and Adam Bolts. The Brothers Strause are best known for the formidable Old Scratch Revival Singers, a very freaky, psychedelic take on old time gospel revival. Buffalows has a simpler sound, centered in old-timey country music. I’m not sure who writes the songs, but I hear some of Brooks’ infallible roots-pop ear for melody. The simple acoustic (except for pedal steel guitar) arrangements and close harmony serve the songs well.
What these songs bring to my mind is the Grateful Dead, circa Workingman’s Dead, when they pulled back from psychedelia and got in touch with their folksy roots. Like the Dead, the Buffalows appropriate the sounds of country music and make it into their own weird thing. The simple chord progressions of folk music are twisted up just enough to sound fresh, without becoming overtly strange.
Back in the ‘70s, when “hippie” became passé, the counterculture folks appropriated the term “freak” for themselves. This came out of Tod Browning’s infamous horror movie Freaks and was meant to encompass both willful strangeness and a sense of a minority culture pitted against the mainstream. The Buffalows are in a sense next-millennium freaks who’ve found a way to make the familiar weird and the weird familiar. And that’s what really makes this EP special: the countrified nostalgia for a hallucinatory past.
