Grant Lee Buffalo
Mighty Joe Moon

A precious group, Grant Lee Buffalo.

Some of the best pages of that 90s USA rock, which sought to revive in a decade of turbulent changes the most classic "American" sound, made of genuine electroacoustic passages, poetry, and the everyday life of the endless rural and coastal expanses, the utopias and human tensions that characterize them, certainly belong to their discography.

It's not that in the grunge years there was a lack of groups eager to drink from the source of the classics: from the Black Crowes to the Jayhawks passing through the American Music Club. Even Pearl Jam - from "Vitalogy" onward - would start a destabilizing and splendid journey in search of their own peculiar American epic, following the revived Neil Young of "Sleeps with angels" and the R.E.M. of "Automatic for the people".

However, the neo-traditionalist groups basically brought nothing new to musical fetishes crystallized in their perfection, relying, at best, on class and feeling.
For Grant Lee Buffalo, it was different: the dreamlike and varied songwriting of leader Grant Lee Phillips was complemented by a musical vision not common, where the contribution of bassist/keyboardist/producer Paul Kimble was fundamental. This resulted in an ability to reinterpret the archetypes of the American song (Cash, Dylan, Young) through the prism of an inspired "British touch", sometimes bearing the stigmata of Bowie's glam languor and Joy Division's decadence, often reinvigorating the whole with rough post-punk debris. After the psych-rock glimmers of the promising "Fuzzy", the next "Mighty Joe Moon" perfected the band's sound fabric. There are thirteen gems of warm, enveloping intensity ranging from melancholically acoustic tones to guitar explosions, where psychedelia and roots-rock follow one another through hypnotic and twilight suggestions.

Jewels abound among these grooves; "Lone star song", electric blues laced with hallucinogens; "Mockingbirds" and the title track, languid rural ballads imbued with Bowiesque moods where Phillips plays with his voice tones, now icy, now in a delicate falsetto; "Demon called deception", where ghostly country echoes break against a gothic cathedral erected by Joy Division; "Sing along" and "Side by side", sumptuous revisitations of Thin White Rope's guitar spleen; "Drag", drawing on ethereal solutions not far from Van Morrison's "Astral weeks". And also the 30s pastoral postcard of "Last days of Tecumseh", or the classic protest folk of "It's the life" while the mature "Rock for ages" closes the album with the flair of the most inspired Springsteen. The enchanting "Lady Godiva and me" instead synthesizes the group's souls at best: starting softly and fairy-tale-like, reconnecting to Neil Young's "Helpless", to then burst into a passion worthy of the Replacements.

Phillips' lyrics are fundamental in defining the tone of the work: "We hunger for a bit of faith to replace our fear", he sang in "Fuzzy". And America is always a receptacle of fears, cynicism, and anguish, where the author moves desolately: no longer grim and direct attacks as in the previous "America snoring" or "Stars and stripes", but astonishing glimpses worthy of an Eastwood film. "Demon called deception" and "It's the life" are emblematic in this sense ("brother nothing here is any good / See the birds they're dropping like a star Wormwood"), while in "Lone star song" the siege of Waco and the story of David Koresh - the Charles Manson of that generation - are revisited, lashing the distorted and manipulative point of view of the mass media.
Such torments inevitably reflect in the private sphere, and here Phillips offers two acoustic gems, "Happiness" and "Honey don't think", reminiscent of Neil Young's "Motion Pictures". Magnificent lyrics in their fragility are "The difference in the two us comes down to the way you rise over things I just put down" or "Could you learn to read minds / and in the case of mine do you read in the dark?".

The magic of the ensemble wouldn't last long (the later "Copperopolis" and "Jubilee" left essentially no trace), but "Mighty Joe Moon" is more than enough to remember Grant Lee Buffalo among the greats of the 90s.