There’s something uniquely dark about the American Old West. Entire nations subjugated, exiled, or exterminated. Homesteaders scraping by to eke out a dirty subsistence, beset on all sides by vicious outlaws, tyrannical lawmen, and greedy land barons. Even nowadays it’s a region plagued by drug issues, food deserts, and financial strain. Life was harsh, unfair, rough, and likely short, and that legacy has made for a lot of grim literature, film, video games, and music. There’s a certain darkness that Americana folk can evoke that not a lot of genres can properly match. And wouldn’t you know it, Lord Buffalo is here with Holus Bolus to illustrate just that point!
While they’re a new name to me personally, Austin natives Lord Buffalo have been honing their craft for more than a decade now. Self-described as drawing from the same well as projects like Woven Hand, Earth, and Nick Cave, their sound is predominantly a dark spin on American folk seasoned with hazy psychedelia and droney doom metal. The balance of these influences does shift often from song to song, but as a whole Holus Bolus does feel totally cohesive in its vision. It’s gloomy and subtly cinematic, with a thick atmosphere that tastefully evokes images of the dry, dusty prairies and the myriad critters and people trying to stay alive therein.
From the quiet opening drone that announces the twangy guitars of the title track, “Holus Bolus” weaves a hypnotic, entrancing listen. The title track is one of the catchier songs on the album for sure, with a slick central riff bolstering David Pruitt’s strong vocals right into some great uneasy lead lines between verses. Off the bat, it needs to be said that Pruitt’s voice is one of my favorite features in Lord Buffalo‘s sound. It’s strong and clear with just enough darkness, grit, and trail dirt. He reminds me a lot of the likes of Bambara‘s Reid Bateh or even Ian Astbury from The Cult. A perfect anchor for the more conventional tracks across the album.
And, of course, the aptly titled second track “Slow Drug” flips the script and introduces the album’s more cerebral side. Conventional structure is eschewed, replaced with a slow, tense build on pulsing ostinato piano and drums, with guitar and violin slowly bleeding more into the mix over heavily distorted vocals. It signposts well that the Lord Buffalo is unafraid to go more abstract in their expression, and the album tends to bounce between that vibe and more regular songwriting across the rest of its runtime, with the odd additional influence bleeding into the mix from time to time.
Take for instance the album’s de facto single “I Wait on the Door Slab”. Nestled comfortably into the album’s latter half, it’s the point where Lord Buffalo leans heaviest on a hard rock vibe, while also drawing in a post-punk approach to darkness that’s nowhere near as readily apparent on the rest of the album. “Cracks in the Vermeer” feels almost post-rock with its haunting, distant guitar underpinnings, while “Passing Joy” and “Malpaisano” both feel more earthy and grounded, the former via downcast strumming acoustics and the latter in its sparse ‘lone man on the plains’ emptiness. Come “Rowing in Eden”, and it feels like Lord Buffalo has found the perfect sonic link between the quieter moments of Earth‘s Pentastar: In The Style of Demons and their full Western reinvention on Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method.
And yet, the album never once lacks cohesiveness. No matter what feeling Lord Buffalo is focusing on, Holus Bolus always feels like it could score a more any number of gritty revisionist Western media, while never seeming too stuck in the past. Perhaps you could say the vibe is more No Country for Old Men and Hell or High Water than Blood Meridian and Unforgiven, but the sound of the plains is alive and (un)well throughout. The guitar tones feel straight out of a seedy saloon displaced forward in time, the violins are elegiac and wispy as the Western wind, and the quiet, trippy wash of synth only ever adds to the heat-burdened, dehydrated delirium like mirages in the distance.
My only real knock against Holus Bolus is that, sometimes, the songs themselves don’t cling to the memory. The feel of the album is nigh perfect, but it’s so easy to get lost in the vibe that I do struggle a little to remember what bits I recall come from which songs, even if they do tend almost universally have some little quirk that makes each stand apart. But then, I do always appreciate an album that successfully thrives on atmosphere, and Holus Bolus is richer with that than Texas was with oil. It inspires the kind of reverie one would expect of riding across the plains; thoughtful, pensive, isolated and lonesome perhaps, but in constant awe of the sweeping vistas all around. Lord Buffalo did an outstanding job carving out this trail, and if you’re up for it, it’s well worth saddling up and taking the ride.
