PICK OF THE DAY

Reno, Nevada’s Buckaroo has everything.

An immediately excellent band name.

Quick, searing tracks of guitars, drums and vocals all descending like restless, blind vultures with giant fangs.

Slow downs only to speed back up to thrashing levels, like a massive fish on a line fighting for its life.

No social media presence.

No discography beyond this EP.

The EP being titled “Demo.”

5 tracks with only one over 2 minutes, by 1 second.

And again, the music itself and Maya Tran’s vocals decimating everyone else out on the range with quick yelps and stares like a saw through a 2x4.

“NO ABSOLUTION,” begins with immediate violence in the sample, and then the sweltering kicks in. Cries like unidentifiable animals in the darkest trees swinging between the pillars of 20 foot tall guitars and drums pressing everyone to the limit. It’s cooking food in a hot pan to the point of burning and then turning the flame down. Tran says “Come on break down now,” as the band brings it down. The new “GUITAR SOLO!” callout has arrived.

It ends only to be sea-sickened by the guitars swerving back and forth on “BY THE KNIFE.” A traipsing approach of threat that grows closer and closer as Buckaroo picks up smoke and fire to throw back at the listener.

And the pyre grows into mushroom clouds disintegrating everything in the line of sight, all the way to the end. The beat keeps changing and stuttering, only to steady for a moment, and then die away.

“SMOKE TUFF,” rolls right off of “BY THE KNIFE,” and barrels like oily ocean waves, clattering with a cowbell shot, and a valley girl insult, right into a biker gang rally before punishing the listener for making it to the minute-thirty mark.

This band makes every second of every song feel like an endless sentence of fighting to breathe one more breath.

“BULL,” carries the continual fire of sneer to the edge again. How many cliff sides can almost fall apart before this ends? There’s laughter, but not funny, there’s a viciousness that seems to grow as the vocals weather on. Buckaroo is fighting til no one else can stand.

Closer, “WHAT’S THIS ALL 4,” leads in with angry wasp bass and the band relentlessly ends this 7-minute brawl with a hatchet in the hand. It’s one more minute to reconsider everything before Buckaroo lands the giant hammer in the center of everything you’ve ever known. The drums beat this EP up until there’s only a bruise left, and the rest of the band keeps kicking until it all abruptly ends.

One of the coolest, fastest, meanest EPS this year, and so quick you can just keep starting it over.

In the varied world of actual owl species, these nocturnal deep thinkers preside not just in nests up in a tree, but in holes in the ground, barns, caves, out in the desert, spread across a prairie, iced in an Arctic tundra.

The varied “place” an owl can find itself existing in, ties to somewhere the band A Place For Owls writes their songs. Not just up in a tree for everyone to gather beneath and look up in admiration, but down in the trench in a desert, in the frozen tundra of aching pain, right alongside the listener. Almost as if this “Place” is working to create a greater place for everyone else, by being the ones willing to hurt, rejoice, contemplate, grapple, cry out, on stage in front of everyone else. So we all have a chance to find a place.

On this sophomore presentation, “how we dig in the earth,” A Place For Owls reconvenes around galloping drum beats painted against a setting sun, myriad acoustic guitars picking through the tiny crop pulled from the backyard garden, Ben Sooy calling from somewhere far away, or in this room right now, and then packed around by the whole band shouting, yelping, and singing if the moonlight fills the room right, and just an edge of the cacophony of existence moves the whole band like normal-people-werewolves clawing at the reality of pain and faith.

The album uncovers a bruise on a chin with opener, “go on,” a tincture of acoustic strings opened like a handheld map of just the corner of a small town. Sooy sings like ending an all night conversation with the croak of a final 5 AM invitation. “Go on and say / Go on and say it all / You’re not okay / You’re not okay at all.” The spike in the early morning sun revealing that the day ahead won’t be easy, but necessary to start digging where things aren’t right, for what could be better. Heavy eyed strings wince in the sunrise, cracking the sky, as the whole band echoes the invitation to SAY IT ALL. A perfectly executed beginning to the next 11 tracks.

Immediately, heated guitars, like a toaster turned on its side, trickle into the frame, and the certain bashes of a band blooming to a new level appears like a fresh photo in the frames on old walls. “hourglass,” grapples with the pinch in the heart of a miscarriage on New Year’s Day. A crushing beginning to a new year, setting the tone for an album that never shies from looking pain in the yellowed eyes. Yes, there’s even a Starbucks reference, which paints a much more vivid picture of reality rather than standing out like a fence post in the middle of a barren field. That’s really a place across most streets we all could run to when things get too hard to face.

Sooy sings, “I am trying to tie a knot on all the grief we’ve seen.” An action the entire album falls under of tying and untying knots in the many aspects of living things out that aren’t as easy as writing words into a song.

A Place For Owls follows this puncture in the fresh air of an opening to the album, with a fully fleshed out experience of what seemed possible on their debut album. The instruments sound thicker, like saws in trees confidently clearing new land. There’s a willingness through the spine of the band to point directly at dark places and shout until the light resolves the issue. Sooy directly calls out to the Lord to take a cup on “huston lake,” and addresses the same Lord as the night stretches on, on crown-jewel-track, “broken open seed.” A Place For Owls postures their sound and songs under the surrendered place of the weight of life crashing down at times, and a prayer standing as the only leg left to make it through. It’s a raw and powerful approach to places that can otherwise suck into themselves like a vacuum in an already self-focused void of brittle, empty breathing.

The very next song, “find your friends and hold them close,” captures the other side of these Heavenly mutters with the reckoning of doubt becoming the entirety of the target. The way this chorus scuttles by with the acoustic washes and Jesse Cowan building the base of a new home with the drum beat that collects the whole song like a pool of water in a hand, gives the desperation of faith and doubt a buoyant place to remind the listener that these struggles bind every mind at different times, like cloud patterns differing in the same sky in an hour, or a day, or even a minute if the wind blows hard enough.

Where many bands and albums attempt places of facing hard truths, and ladling out pain in the deeper places into chords and melodies, A Place For Owls weaves all of the internal dealings with the precision of their musical strengths in such a simple ease, it sounds like this is their 20th album doing something they were made for.

The band’s lineup stays consistent with the five minds creating an easy alchemy of instrumentation that never feels overdone or under-attempted. It’s the abstract and tangible of how Nick Webber and Daniel Perez key guitars into the same painting with notes swirling like the smoke Sooy keeps coming back to in the cigarettes held in that backpack on “desmond hume,” or the flutters of wings on the breezes of “haunted.”

Ryan Day and Jesse Cowan reappear in a specific ability to work together in creating concrete roadways for the band to steadily navigate wherever horns, or strings, ambient patches, or heavy waves of crushing power can fully realize the possibility of what A Place For Owls is capable of producing.

Where the Lord and doubt were a specific tone on the first half of the album, these cigarettes and smoke become a focal point of the next third of the album. Sooy and Daniel (I’m guessing bandmate Daniel Perez are smoking) on “a tattoo of a candle,” Sooy confronts the relief of his step-dad dying without blinking, while paying homage to one of the best characters on the TV show Lost, as well as the pack of American Spirits on “desmond hume.” Then the tone turns as Elliott Green joins Sooy in singing about dreams going up in smoke. Maybe not the same kind of smoke as the cigarette idol previously built, but it burns all the same.

The final tracks on the album focus in on “walking,” and companionship (genuine or broken.) The references to walking with someone begin in “when your eyes close,” and trail to the end of the album. The line “As you’re walking, as you’re walking, As you’re walking next to me,” becomes a cycled reiteration that gets to a point of uncertainty. What is this walk? What is unraveling on this walk? Along with the walking is a certain dealing with confession. Confessions of shrinking, or waiting. “what I have to say,” replies to the opening track as Sooy states, “God, I’m not okay,” and a seeking for apologies, for forgiveness, for a settling of the obvious pains a Mother has caused as mirrored in “desmond hume.” The middle two songs in the walking phase may not directly speak of the action of walking together, but the songs are seeking places to meet alongside all the same. To be spoken to plainly, to be fixed and refocused.

Closer, “help me let the right ones in,” states, “You walk with them a little while,” before really calling for a resolve to this whole album. “HELP ME LET THE RIGHT ONES IN.” From all the seeking and wrestling this album becomes, Sooy calls for the guidance of another, “walking alongside” to discover what is right and where to go next. This song ends the album the way a good television show, say Lost, for instance, can end an episode or a season with enough questions answered, while also leaving a gaping hole that may never get answered, at least for now, to be dealt with and looked at again next time. Next album. Next song. Next episode. Next hour.

It’s that same weird reality of a sky we live under that constantly changes shape and pattern, precipitation or dry sunlight, and up in that sky is really the PLACE for an owl, a bird, an eye to look around when all that’s needed is a breath, or a smoke, or a moment to not have anything to do but wonder. This is the place, and we’ve all been let in.

Yu Tokumo scratches the chords out of the guitar like the itching response of actual wool. The vocals sound coated in a steady diet of microscopic coarse bits. The drum beats click so simply or ring like doorbells knocking on a door (see “Bon”) in a way that feels like this entire project got recorded through the wall.

Wool & The Pants uses a visual congruence from album to album of people with faces covered. By a square, by some kind of smoke formation. There’s a mystery to the closed up, coated palette the album lands within. It’s like listening to a band encased inside of one of those cheap peppermint hard candies.

Every word Tokumo sings lands with a true honesty. Not in the lyric even, but in the way the words drip and dribble to life. Carried by the guitar cutting in and out, as it does on the island at night of “Nettaiya.” The synthetic flute carrying ghostly baskets with phantom hands.

“A Night Without Moonlight,” whirls with a dizzy guitar part that circles back and around like a sidewinder in a food storage container. The horns crying like ducks in a frozen lake simmer underneath. Worms calling out from beneath a switchback on the top of an iced mountain.

Throughout the 9 songs here, the tempo and concept doesn’t shift much, but the pattern and aesthetic swirls. It’s different birds landing in the same fountain.

The silent panic attack in the synths on “Nikai No Otoko,” create a tension in the glimmer on water with a whirlpool growing like a sore throat.

Wool & The Pants enter the bronze picture frame from another area than directly through the side. It’s the mystery of how an animal got in the shed, and now has created an entire home there.

But the home created holds answers and deeper mysteries worth digging into.

Listen without expectation and take everything away from it.

A venture of mists. A stolen corner of a windy morning.

Tristan Eckerson pinches the frequency of something aching up above the crystal of snow caps. Draws down the perimeter of the ringing light around a distant star, forming it into a dissolvable substance that is sinking in the water.

Purple Decades holds all the majesty and fragility of a paper crescent moon halfway sunken into a gently lapping sea. The kind of giant lake that gets the more ambitious moniker.

With long stretches of melody that change with the turning of a season, the anchor of the songs lasts in continuations. The infinity of somewhere as a starting point that stays the course under the feet of the more delicate and gently manipulated upper regions of the songs.

On songs like, “Completely Still” or “In June,” glimpses of upstairs individual notes string like elderly Christmas lights around a scrawny tree in the orange bath of old lamps and glimmering fake snow.

Other tracks here define themselves in more of the never-ending expanse of time stretching like waiting for someone’e arrival. The anticipation of the reintroductions makes every minute, two, and every sound the possibility of the moment.

Eckerson works in method. There can be as much time as needed to draw out the purposes of these songs. These are not simply splays of sound to make something into peace. These are definitive trajectories creeping by like the tunneling worms under our feet that stretch on as long as the eyeless characters need. Inner workings of rich earth devoured by smaller mouths.

The metallic ring of “Interlude Crash,” gently creates the silenced version of something heaving forward.

The consistent tending of a garden allows the waterer, the keeper, to recognize the magnificence of a single  cabbage leaf expanding overnight at rates that seem perfectly impossible. Eckerson shapes the tracks on this album in a similar fashion. A slow growth toward a full leaf that suddenly grows into complete focus. A quiet petition toward a fullness.

This is a devouring up of bustling, in the name of chewing through a bite of food properly. It’s a hand in the water feeling the movement instead of moving the water.

(Beacon Sound)

Yes, this is the SECOND self-titled Teenage Tom Petties album that exists.

The second very good self-titled Teenage Tom Petties album.

To no one’s surprise, that is a true Small Albums head, this NEW TTP album scorches its way right into our Pick Of The Day territory.

Tom Brown, the continual mastermind of this project, picks a few notes out of a guitar like ice cubes sliding around on a wood floor, over the major thumping of the kick drum before, “I Got Previous,” churns right into place. Along with one of the greatest names for a song, this starting place picks the listener back up in the same worn out car with a missing window and a steering wheel covered in dust, and the heat of the road radiating up through the holes in the floor. And the drive is short, but full of turns and weird moments, in a memorized neighborhood. That could be a coyote over there, or a ballon, or maybe a shadow, or maybe nothing at all.

Brown writes and strums in a maintained environment, much like a multiverse of sorts, where characters and musical references, white hot guitar tones, and the bashing of a band in the same old garage keep playing. It might be past midnight, the neighbors may be banging on the door to shut it down, but Teenage Tom Petties can’t cool down. And they certainly won’t turn these amps off.

What continues to churn centralizes around Tom Brown’s keen sense of this well worn, gravely aesthetic. A gargling of a lukewarm drink and a fireplace poker forcing the red coals to keep up.

Other than the bass assigned to Jim Quinn, and backing vocals from Galen Richmond, Brown carries all instrumentation in a backpack with patches SEWED ON, not stuck on the canvas with that fake adhesive.

From massive, growling electric chords, acoustic guitar strung in moments like lights across a dingy back porch, drums beating against a wall, like a rhino interested in setting itself free at the zoo, there’s familiarity to the way the band plays more than likely because Brown is crunching everything together instrument by instrument.

The first 4 songs on this album clock in just under 10 minutes, and deliver 5 of the best minutes of music anywhere this year. Only to be followed by “Dumb Enough,” a crown jewel in the TTP catalogue.

I could go on about the brown paneled basement, and spilled suds of a six pack on the carpet. The power tools it takes to carve songs out that have this rough of edges, or the way these songs on the surface could sound like no one cares at all. But the secret of why TTP is one of the strongest and best bands in the world, rests in the mind and hands of a songwriter that understands how to write concisely, precisely, and with a poise and excellence that allows the looseness of baggy jeans to seem like the wearer didn’t even realize how relaxed everything “looks.” But this is a method that can’t be attained by just trying to strum around a room and howl for fun. This is musical prowess, this is an on purpose, singular ability.

Brown keeps every song under 3 minutes, and packs every moment with melodies that will play back in memory on and on, while also arranging the instruments together in perfected trophy cases of delivering just what everything needs, not wants.

“Tuff Top,” finds Brown splitting the neck of an electric guitar down the center with saw blade chords, and high speed hi-hat directing a quick chorus that could be 10 times as long, before breaking down into a reimagining of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” and then stopping the motion for something else.

As mentioned before, center song, “Dumb Enough,” carries the melody and hook writing of Brown’s brilliance with a kick drum working a little extra to punch the chorus into place. Even when Brown asks “Are you dumb enough?” and follows it with “I think you’re dumb enough,” there’s something gentle in the tone of the singing that doesn’t feel like poison in the walls.

The relentless pursuit of micro-speed round song writing perfection never slows down. From the “Hey Jeanine’s” of “I Got Previous,” to the high speed chase of “Night Nurse,” with “WOW OH’s” landing like a helicopter in an office building, to the acoustic introduction of “My Mistake,” paired with references to Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” AND Frogger update “Crossy Road,” to the whirl of “Ex Gf Day,” Brown continues to understand exactly what personal assignments TTP lays out from song to song and album to album, and nothing will steal from the purity of letting everything rip, while also presenting an absolute masterclass on how songs should be written, music should sound, and having a good time creating can look.

(Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud)