Buffalo
Volcanic Rock

THE REVIEW

Troglodytes, cavemen, uncouth stone apes who have memorized the lesson of Black Sabbath. The guitar wielded like a knobby club, steamroller. The sound is saturated, rocky, and (see cover) magmatic. Incandescent lapilli, rivers of distorted and malevolent riffs. The structure of the pieces is a violent assault on the stomach, ruthless.

And desert. A huge, powerful volcano in the middle of an ocean of dunes and cactus. A Krakatoa immersed in red sand. We are talking about Buffalo, Australian heavy-doom craftsmen, stoners with a ton of amplifiers thrown in your face directly from '73. One of the forgotten glories of aussie-rock, long before Radio Birdman set off a cohesive scene for the entire continent.

Lost in the Pacific Ocean, very far away, I imagine them in their smelly cowboys' shack, submerged in vinyls. Obviously: Blue Cheer, distorted rock, heavy blues, Detroit. Or maybe just bank clerks stunned by the invention of the riff; it doesn't matter, because the result is truly sanguine and impulsive. A punch on the mug, a hammer where it hurts most, a baseball bat to the neck: take your pick.

Revived from the folds of time by Aztec Records (preserving Australia's rich musical heritage), Buffalo's second LP is a napalm bomb. In the genre, perhaps the forgotten pearls are others (the mountain of amps built by Randy Holden for Population II? The Pentagram 45s rediscovered only in the new millennium and sounding like freaking classics?) but the final tracked caterpillar "Shylock" (dedicated to the Shakespearean merchant of Venice) is enough to desire this volcanic rock too: malignant groove and a sequence of butcher's hangman chords.

Certainly not innovators, masters of one of the heaviest and most brazen sounds of the time, they swam in the same sea (of lava) in which coeval anthropomorphs were frolicking (to name two: Sir Lord Baltimore, Night Sun). Suited for those who, between a rare steak and a mixed salad, choose...