What does it sound like?:
Full disclosure first. Shifting Buffalo, ITRW, is my friend Ben, so don’t expect an 1979 NME style hatchet job here. But…but…come back! This is really good so I’m sharing it here.
The origin of this album was an intensive songwriting day when SB single handedly wrote, recorded and mixed 10 songs in a day using the “A Shropshire Lad” poems as lyrics. This is a brushed up and slightly more polished version of that manic effort but still has a charming bedroom studio vibe.
The instrumentation is remarkably full band sounding given its origins, with a pallet of drum machines, guitars, synths, other keys and vocals. The general feel is a interesting hybrid of late 70s synth pop experimentation (woozy synths, drum machines, and doomy vocals) with perhaps proggy guitar overtones, though “The loveliest of trees” with its bucolic lyrics and acoustic guitars could easily be a Caravan outtake. Some tracks are more conventional rock workouts, “Wake” being a particular highlight. A.E. Housman could have been famous in the 70s.
Overall it’s a fun set rich in texture and variety and for an asking price of, oooh, nothing, it’s well worth checking out.
What does it all *mean*?
It means not everything has to be polished and quantised to a cold hard shine. Rough sounding raw inspiration still has a place.
Many bargains are to be had on Bandcamp but this one is at:
Shifting Buffalo – “A Shropshire Lad”
Goes well with…
I was stacking the log shed with it on ear buds. There’s some fun stereo monkeying about and phased voices which suit headphones.
Release Date:
01/11/2019
Might suit people who like…
Early synth pop, non-mainstream, I guess AE Housman fan might check it out….
As a fellow musical artisan from the fair county of Hertfordshire I would also like recommend a lis to this as it’s a brave and ambitious project. Getting people to listen to ‘non professional’ recordings is hard, hard work not least because there is so much stuff out there and I know that any kind of reaction – even if not complimentary – is preferable to silence.
Downloaded.