Maybe it's because the roots-and-folk musical landscape has just become so over-populated with new and excellent songwriters (like The Lumineers, Grey Kingdom, Daniel Romano and so on), but it's really difficult to get excited about Jimbo Mathus' new album with The Tri-State Coalition. White Buffalo is very much a casualty of timing; had it been released five years ago, the album might have seemed exciting for listeners looking for a sparer, more songwriter-ly antidote to the over-produced and Pro-Tools-ed hordes which infested the mainstream at the time but, now, it's hard to not just focus on what Mathus and The Tri-State Coalition is lacking and why all their peers sounds so much better than they do.
To the record's credit, there is no real descent into mediocrity on White Buffalo, the record just starts and stays there as “In The Garden” opens with the exact same kind of ukulele plucking which has already thrilled audiences on other records a dozen times before. Again, were this song part of the crowd pushing through the mainstream five years ago, it would have stood out; Mathus' homespun, soulful voice (which bears a passing resemblance to Springsteen in the Seventies) could have been attention-grabbing, but it just sounds like a poor man's parody now because the sound of it has been done better by other artists recently. Lines like, “In the garden, there stood something wicked” do sound promising, but they don't bear any fruit; the energy just dies on the vine because other nu-folkies have already set a poppy, audience-pandering precedent for including a shiny hook somewhere that will get listeners singing along and that just doesn't happen here. The band's fortunes don't get any better as “(I Wanna Be Your) Satellite” tries to inject a bit of soul (well, the sort of soul which people would have expected to come from Billy Joel in 1983 or '84, anyway) into the proceedings, but the going really gets worse as the band “brings it down for a minute” and attempts to really be emotionally poignant through “Tennessee Walker Line,” “Hatchie Bottoms” and “Poor Lost Souls,” but really only succeeds in inspiring yawns.
It is worth pointing out that, of this album's ten tracks, two are absolutely must-hear numbers: the title track and “Fake Hex” are absolutely great. “White Buffalo” makes a great attempt at rocking out a slab of Neil Young and Crazy Horse-styled goodness and “Fake Hex” has the kind of AM radio-ready twang that served The Eagles well enough when they were taking it easy with Glen Frey up front in 1972, but those are just two songs – and two songs shouldn't even have to try and redeem a whole album. There simply should not be as much filler on a major label release as there is on White Buffalo.
So what needs to happen for/to this band? What does Jimbo Mathus and The Tri-State Coalition need to do to improve on White Buffalo? Stop trying to follow the herd! There's no way to tell if this band is capable of standing out from the rest of the nu-folk pack because all the songs on White Buffalo are mawkish versions of material that has been done before. That said, the first thing this band needs to do is grow an original idea of its own and record it. After that, we'll see if they can cut it; because White Buffalo just doesn't do the job.
Artist:
www.jimbomathus.com/
www.myspace.com/jimbomathus
www.reverbnation.com/jimbomathustristatecoalition
www.facebook.com/jimbomathus
www.twitter.com/JimboMathus
Album:
White Buffalo is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
