“…and then it gets into another scene:” Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez are Buke & Gass.
“Medulla Oblongata” (streaming @ TP)
Buke & Gass’s EP, +/-, streaming for free @ bandcamp
by Blake Cooper
Sometimes I ask myself, “why isn’t this music really, really popular?” I said it aloud when a friend played me Chris Thile’s Deceiver — a pretty great record (it even won a Grammy) written and produced by a super-talented musician — and I say it to myself all the time while listening to Nick Drake, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Paul Westerberg and the Fiery Furnaces. These are creative artists who, I feel, should have mass appeal.
The most recent addition to this list is Buke & Gass. Like any good band, they make music that uses existing paradigms in creative ways to generate something refreshing. This applies to their songwriting — thundering polyrhythms pulse around what sounds suspiciously like pop songs — as much as it does their actual musicianship: Buke & Gass even play tweaked and modified versions of traditional instruments (a “buke” is a bass ukulele; the “gass” is a guitar/bass combo), creating an admirably metaphorical relationship to the music.
It’s hard to compare Buke & Gass to a type of music, or at least to one type of music; big drums and distortion give it a little ’90s rock edge, female vocals resembling a prettier-sounding No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani, production suited to the tastes of two musicians from brooklyn circa 2010… maybe I’m not painting the best picture here. But it has a somewhat gallop-ey sound. It was described by, uh, buke player Arone Dyer (in an interview with Radiolab) as being like “a recently retired schoolhouse janitor riding the back of a big horse that’s galloping over different scenes— like, one scene could be a really calm, rose petal-surfaced pond. It jumps over that, and then it gets into another scene where there’s a big party, and there’s topless beach-goers, totally pruned out from hanging out on the beach, and they’re very surprised…” The audience, says Dyer, is the janitor. It has edge, but that edge is attached to totally catchy and well-designed songs. Without such a strong core to their music, Buke & Gass might be little more than a novelty act. They pull it off because they make music that is interesting enough to be different yet consistent enough to draw one in immediately.
Riposte is out September 14th on Brassland. If you want to buy it, click here. They’ll also be on tour next month, and tour dates are here.
