Buck Dharma
Flat Out

THE REVIEW

Donald Roeser, known to everyone as Buck Dharma since this nickname given in his youth by his manager Sandy Pearlman has completely caught on, is the lead guitarist and one of the two vocalists of the Blue Oyster Cult, a New York band with enormous personality and influence among insiders but, for unknown and nevertheless unjustified reasons, has only had moderate popular success.
Buck Dharma is a great guitarist, playing with a fluid and compelling style, terribly precise and melodic. He prefers to race across the fretboard and execute many notes through his expressive "legato," yet without indulging in excessive self-importance.
Buck is also a wonderful composer, writing with a melodic and creative style, evocative and lyrical, successfully contrasting with the always acid and psychedelic outputs of his colleague and alter ego in BOC, Eric Bloom.
Buck Dharma is finally an excellent singer, half of the Blue Oyster Cult's repertoire passes through his vocal cords, capable of a suspended and fascinating timbre, without force and screams but with an out-of-class rhythmic and melodic quality, again successfully contrasting with the superbly mocking and corrosive singing of Bloom himself.

In 1982, he tried it with this solo album, which went completely unnoticed and has always been hard to find (but today there is the Internet, thankfully): no surprise upon listening, it feels like listening to two halves of two Blue Oyster Cult records, after all, his voice, guitar, and way of composing are so personal and strong that they constitute a true trademark. Nine compositions in the disc, overall a bit more relaxed and harmless than his works with BOC, and this is mainly because of the absence of Allan Lanier’s keyboards, who is also a master at infusing tension and disturbance into the atmospheres created by this seminal hard rock group. Not all the pieces are noteworthy, but for a good half of them, you can easily revel in vocal and instrumental melodies of exquisite inspiration. For example, in "That Summer Night", in "Cold Wind", and in "All Tied Up", ballads or semi-ballads full of good taste and skill. "Solo" records by members of musical formations are almost never masterpieces. It's natural after all that the best ideas are inserted into the melting pot of one's band, and especially, it's quite another matter to develop concepts and arrangements of one’s music together with other colleagues who can contribute their own touch and enrich the soundscape with their own sensitivity. This work does not escape the rule, but it is far from useless, containing some beautiful songs by a guy who has composed dozens of memorable ones and simply cannot stoop to mediocre levels. Too much class.