Send "Buffalo Tom " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Bbc |
 When Buffalo Tom released Three Easy Pieces in 2007, following an almost decade-long hiatus, it felt like they’d never been away. A lot of this is no doubt due to the type of band they are – never showy or extravagant, theirs is a driving, solid, heart-on-sleeve indie rock that’s about as earnest as it gets. But that’s no criticism – Bill Janovitz’s voice is warm and weary, and his songs are comfortable in all the best possible ways. This windswept, simple aesthetic is perhaps best summed up in 1992’s Taillights Fade (from Let Me Come Over), which really should have been a world-conquering hit, such is its stately, anthemic quality.Nineteen years later the band are in robust health, and Skins makes for an impressive, graceful addition to their catalogue. It also finds them joined by Throwing Muse Tanya Donnelly on Don’t Forget Me, a gorgeous, folky strum which could only have been written and performed by artists as seasoned as these. Elsewhere, The Kids Just Sleep and Guilty Girls bound along on sprightly guitar riffs, Paper Knife is almost a waltz, while The Hawks & The Sparrows taps into that widescreen sense of longing that the band encapsulated so well back in 1992. The great thing about Buffalo Tom is how wonderfully far-removed they are from any sense of what is fashionable in the music industry. These songs are little self-contained worlds unto themselves – perhaps unremarkable at first; straightforward; lyrically upfront. Let them in, though, and they’ll enrich your life like a good short story, evoking the kind of blue-collar Americana that Raymond Carver dealt in so powerfully....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| On Skins, Buffalo Tom digs a little bit deeper than they have on their earlier work, and they sound like a band that's gradually coming to grips with the notion of maturity. Whatever rust they showed on 2007's Three Easy Pieces, their first album in nearly a decade, has been shaken off here. Skins is a polished, occasionally gritty rock record that, in its best moments, mines real conflict and resurrects the questions that have lingered since the mid '90s about why Buffalo Tom never quite broke into the big leagues. Skins's songs are those of a middle-aged band: It isn't an album of grizzled, get-off-my-lawn-isms, but it's a mature work that isn't afraid to confront matters of aging, and songs like "The Kids Just Sleep" and "Down" are drawn from true-to-life experiences and the perspective that comes from them. On "Don't Forget Me," frontman Bill Janovitz sings, "Don't forget me/Everybody says at a certain age/When everything is moving too fast," using the calloused surfaces of his tenor to great effect. That he's joined by the always-welcome presence of Tanya Donelly makes the song an obvious standout, and Donelly is in predictably fine voice. "Guilty Girls" and "Down" also boast powerful hooks, bolstered by thundering percussion and electric guitar power chords. The ability to structure their post-grunge rock songs around massive pop hooks has always been one of Buffalo Tom's strengths, and Skins proves that they haven't lost that skill. If there's a knock against the record, it's that it sounds out of time. Without changing a note of its current form, "Guilty Girls" would have been a great single to balance out something like Collective Soul's "December" or Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" some 15 years ago....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Music has a way of reaching out to people in far-flung places, and at a time when the Internet era was just getting off the ground, Buffalo Tom was a group that connected me to a young woman in Washington, D.C. that I’d become e-mail pen pals with. In 1995, I had exactly one Buffalo Tom album in my CD collection: 1993’s Big Red Letter Day. I had considered it to be an OK record, but it didn’t exactly shatter my world. I was pretty much into loud, angry alternative rock at the time, as was much of my peers at the university I was attending, and had found that Big Red Letter Day, which I’d acquired late in high school after reading a review of it in my bible at the time, Alternative Press, was a smidge too much on the lite-rock, soulful side. (This is ironic, considering that I like soul now. Anyhow.) So to make a long story short, I had wound up meeting this young university student online, probably on a Usenet message board, and we got to conversing, and then we got to trading mixtapes with each other. This girl—let’s just refer to her as Rachael for kicks, since that’s a Buffalo Tom song—had originally been from Boston, so she started to introduce me to music from her hometown. While I had the Cavedog’s Soul Martini taped from a friend’s CD in high school, she turned me onto the brilliance of the band’s earlier debut album, Joyrides for Shut-Ins. And then, on one of the hometown-band mixtapes she sent me, she had a run of six Buffalo Tom songs from a little album that I hadn’t heard called Let Me Come Over, plus their cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Heaven”, which, by the way, is a rarity amongst cover versions in that it utterly blows the original out of the water by being just stripped down to an acoustic guitar and a heartbreaking vocal. Cutting to the chase, the tracks she put on this tape utterly made me rethink the brilliance of that band. I know that a lot of type has been printed about the angst-fueled 1992 milestone that is Let Me Come Over and it shouldn’t bear repeating that the record is considered the band’s high-water mark, but, needless to say, I tracked down the CD and it has been in my possession ever since. That’s more than I can say about Big Red Letter Day and 1998’s Smitten, the last record the group would put out before going on hiatus for nine years, both of which eventually got plucked out of my collected assortment of discs and sold off to used CD stores when such stores actually tended to buy used CDs as opposed to vinyl, which is more sell-able now as things would have it. Anyhow, I guess you can say I was underwhelmed with both efforts....full text |
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