album of the week: 11.5

Buffalo Daughter

The Weapons of Math Destruction

Buffalo Ranch (2010)

why you'll love it: some driving instrumentals. Pleasing moog heavy sound.

why you'll hate it: Aimless, flat, uncharacteristic childish moments.

A new Buffalo Daughter album is one of those things to come across my media radar as an absolute gift. Something that I didn't even bother crossing my fingers for because it seemed so improbable. Over the past couple years, musings over twitter, rumors, and a couple leaked songs here and there, have finally led to a real-life physical release by the progressive krautrock pop act.

While trying my best not to turn my nose away from this "gift", I gotta say, The Weapons of Math Destruction falls short of the inspiration left by most Buffalo Daughter albums. Many of the songs have a disappointingly simple, even sophomoric, delivery to them that you wouldn't expect in a 4th album. There are a lot of outdated Shibuya-Kei tropes (of which I feel the band has never had a significant relationship with in the first place), like Microsoft Sam/Speak-N-Spell vocals, a flat G-rated rap, and some badly placed show-tunes samples. It's not just the presence of these cliches, but the flippant and insignificant use of them that make me stunned that this was the same band that made such fantastic progressive works like I (2001) and Psychic (2003).

While the album does spend a good chunk of its time suspended in air flailing, there is at least a good half hour of solid music (which is all I ask of any album really). Most of these moments of joy come from instrumental tracks such as "Two Two" and "Run". bd still can build an hypnotizing beat better than more popular party-driven krautrock acts like !!! and Fujiya & Miyagi. "A11 A10ne" is one of the few impressive tracks with lyrics. Other songs I'm on the fence with are "The Battle Field in My Head" (very Tom Tom Club inspired) and "Unknown Forces" (which never quite emotionally manifests itself as intended).

This is sort of the same situation I ran into with this year's releases by Gorillaz and Hot Chip. It's a good album; but with all the filler, and comparing it to their back catalogue, it's hard not to see it as a failure. Hot Chip was trying something new, Damon simply doesn't care about the Gorillaz universe anymore; but bd's case apparently seems to be incompetence. I mean, they released a song last year ("Galactic S-O-U-L") that is dramatically better than anything on this album. They certainly aren't over the hill, or out of ink; it just seams as if this time they fumbled the ink and spilled it all over the canvas.