Buffalo Tom
Three Easy Pieces
New West Records
By Mike Randall
After one spin of Three Easy Pieces, the vibe in the air immediately felt different. It was as if re-entering a time and a place, but not in a nostalgic sense, when modern rock radio still felt alive and important, and college dorm rooms were filled with roaring open-chord guitars and perfect choruses instead of the clicking of video game controllers.
Fully reunited with all their original members, Buffalo Tom return with their seventh album and first record of all-new material since 1998’s Smitten, although if one weren’t concerned with time, it’d be easy to imagine Pieces could have come just a year afterwards. It’s as consistent a record that will land on shelves in 2007, chock full of pedal-to-the-floor guitars, memorable hooks and the type of let’s-go-out-and-take-on-the-world energy that is completely absent in today’s alternative rock scene.
Somehow, Buffalo Tom forgot to include a throwaway.
Three Easy Pieces recalls some of the best work of fellow former-college-darlings like Toad the Wet Sprocket, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, The Lemonheads and Matthew Sweet, only these songs are all brand new. The title track is among the strongest Buffalo Tom has written in quite some time, while “You’ll Never Catch Him” is the greatest song Soul Asylum never wrote. They sound as if they have something to prove, and they probably do, on fiery tracks like “Lost Downtown,” “Good Girl” and “Gravity,” but they also show they can still turn it down a bit, as they do on the exceptional piano-lined “Pendleton,” and add some well-placed twang on tunes like “CC and Callas” and “Thrown.”
Buffalo Tom is as American sounding of a band there is, even if today’s rock world doesn’t demand such a thing. What’s astounding about Three Easy Pieces is that they’ve taken an unfortunately dated art form and made it sound fresh and relevant without doing anything different. To all the campuses out there: great college radio bands are still around but sadly, one of the best is from 1988. You might want to ask your older brother or sister about them.
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