Saturday, May 30, 2009

Bringin’ Back the Buff

Earlier this week Mrs. Kyality successfully guilted me into finally building the new IKEA dining room table I’ve left sitting in its box for the last 3 months—there were just so many screws! But it turned out to be a great thing—not only did we end up with a sexy new table for the Kyality Kids to trash, it gave me the chance resurrect the multi-talented 90’s indie rock band Grant Lee Buffalo and stream them back into my regular listening rotation.

Lead and voiced by the instrumental wizard Grant Lee Phillips, The Buff—as I like to call them—apparently ruled much of the underground LA music scene throughout the 90’s under then careful tutelage of the Godfather of Alternative Music: Michael Stipe. Their sound is defined by a combo of heavy-duty electric and steely 12-strings and a rich mix of other diverse instruments like rockin’ accordions and a deep dark upright bass.

Upto12 introduced me to GLB jut over ten years ago and when the powerful and haunting opening chords to the anthemic “Jupiter and Teardrop(thanks m.) from their debut album Fuzzy lit up our little JBL On Stage speakers, a flood of memories and awesomeness came rushing back. The album rocked so hard, and the table took so long, that I ended up nearly listing to their entire discography including: Mighty Joe Moon (amazing title track by the way), Copperopolis (apparently not on iTunes) and Jubilee. Check them out, you won’t be disappointed.

3 comments:

upto12 said...

It's "Jupiter and Teardrop". And please don't call them "the Buff" — you don't really do that anyway, do you? I've never heard it... I think you're making it up.

kyality said...

Okay, so maybe I just liked calling them "the Buff" cause it worked with well with the title of the post. But apparently I need to do stuff like that (and typos) to get you to comment on my blog anyway. And look, it worked!

Justin said...

Oh, man, do I have similar memories. Although it's not so much the soundtrack as the sheer number of screws that I keep thinking about.

Great music.