OKLAHOMA CITY — With a single note of whining feedback and a two-ton kick drum kickoff, Lord Buffalo stampede into their new LP “Holus Bolus,” a widescreen desert requiem for the American Dream.
The songs feel gravitational, starting deep and weighty and growing to gain mass and power with every new battered tom or weeping violin line.
Comparisons to dark, experimental giants like Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds or Swans feel perfectly apt and earned through the band’s now fully realized combo of textural, fuzzy guitar, wistful violin, guttural bass organ, and massive drums, but there’s never much feeling that their aping someone else’s sound.
Even with such a defined sound and such a comparatively unique combination of instruments (for what is ostensibly rock music), there’s a wide range of styles and shades throughout the album. Moods wind from the arid bleakness of “Malpaisano” through the gothy, surprisingly danceable “I Wait on the Door Slab” and on through titanic, instrumental epics like “Slow Drug.”
But the band isn’t just spanning a wide, expansive stretch of sonics and style, they also span a good amount of geographical distance. Their home base is in Austin, but singer/guitarist Daniel Pruitt and guitarist Garrett Hellman both grew up in Stillwater and now Pruitt lives right here in Oklahoma City.
So to celebrate the July 12th release of “Holus Bolus,” Lord Buffalo are doing a handful of album release shows in all the markets they call home, bringing them to OKC’s Blue Note on July 20th alongside doomers The Well.
The shows in Austin, Tulsa, and OKC then kick off a wider tour of the nation’s western half, taking them to the deserts, mountains, and sprawling oceans that seem to so heavily influence their sound.
“We spent all this time and energy in our creative mode in the studio making this record,” Pruitt told me. “Now we get to figure out how to pull it all off live.”
It’s that feeling of being locked into creativity and focused so heavily on the writing and recording while time slips away that inspired the album’s title, “Holus Bolus.”
“It’s a kind of bastardization of Latin that essentially means ‘all at once,’” he said. “It’s like it just surprises you. You’re so used to working on it and creating it and then one day it’s just finished. And it also comes from the pandemic, in a way. Like how everything was shut down and uncertain for so long and then it all just came back all at once.”
The pandemic era had a fundamental effect on Lord Buffalo, spurring the first period for the band of remote work and long-distance songwriting, something that prepared them for their current interstate arrangement with Pruitt living more than five hours away from the group.
“Really, it just means a lot of driving for me,” he said, laughing. “It’s a lot of spitballing ideas for a while and then a lot of sending stuff back and forth. It wasn’t like that in the beginning for us, you know. It used to be just sitting down in a room together all the time and just jamming. We were that rare band that always really loved to practice.”
That’s not surprising for a band spawned out of the Austin scene, where the atmosphere of live music and indie culture has loomed larger than life for decades.
It’s a scene and a community that Pruitt said has definitely helped to influence and develop Lord Buffalo, but one that is maybe more stifling or narrow than a younger, more undefined music city like OKC.
“Austin is a weird place,” he said. “Obviously it’s seen as this huge music city, and it is, and you can find almost any style of music somewhere at some bar in Austin any time. But it still feels like most of what gets exported from Austin is mainly folk or blues-rock, you know.”
That’s a very different state of affairs to a scene like OKC’s that has remained more nebulous and open-ended in its breakout styles, with recent nationwide successes ranging from the seething sludge metal of Chat Pile to the theatre-rock of Johnny Manchild.
“In Austin, the more heavy and experimental stuff kind of has to exist on the sidelines,” Pruitt said. “And I think maybe that’s a real advantage for a place like Oklahoma City, where people don’t have such a clear, specific idea of what music has to be here.”
When the band brings their mammoth, devastating sound to the Blue Note stage on July 20th, they’ll for sure be bringing with them a different idea of what heavy music can be in Oklahoma City.”
“It’ll be interesting to see the reaction,” Pruitt said. “I’m really curious to see how it goes,”
“Holus Bolus” by Lord Buffalo is available on streaming services everywhere now.
They’ll be celebrating the album’s release at Blue Note alongside The Well on Saturday, July 20th.
Follow Lord Buffalo online on their official site at lordbuffalo.com and on Facebook at facebook.com/lord.buffalo.band and on Instagram at @lordbuffalo.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.