Here we go, my first exposure to ‘post grunge’. In reality it sounds like regular rock music to me, and of high quality.
Public Buffalo are from western Jutland, that European mainland part of Denmark that is home to both trendy music city Aarhus and Legoland. Their collective leitmotif is the perception and recognition of living in a troubled time – well they got that right - and their mantra is that no-one is on their own; no man is an island.
Their promo photo has them sat in front of a wall of cassette tapes, looking a little nerdy, as if they are the local computer hack group waiting for the week’s session to start. But photos can belie the reality. These lads can rock.
The track, ‘Floodgate’, opens with so much guitar reverb that I considered making a cup of tea while it ended but a good old metal style driving bass and drum contribution kept me hanging on. And I’m glad I did because in the middle of that insistent driving beat, about a third of the way through, there’s a little interlude, you couldn’t really call it a bridge, which is 10 seconds or so of electro-pop. It’s so off the wall it could have been a different song which the engineer accidentally played over theirs.
What does this tell me? Firstly, that there is likely more to them than meets the eye. And secondly, that they are probably a pretty accomplished live band.
Public Buffalo are lead singer and guitarist, Oskar, guitarist, Simon, bassist, Andreas, saxophonist and pianist, Sigurd, and drummer and second vocalist, Konrad.
Their forthcoming EP, ‘The Dam’, features five different songs that all circle around the same themes: Doubt, loneliness, anger, anxiety, opposites and confusion. The five band members have all faced times of struggle and times of joy (to be honest they don’t look old enough to have experienced much of either!), and that has become the building blocks of their first official release.