By any measure, Phantom Buffalo should be the feel-good story of the Portland music scene. A handful of winsome, waifish art students with occasional facial hair, they’ve wowed the crowd at South by Southwest and been signed to the UK’s Rough Trade record label, home of — ho, hum — Belle & Sebastien, the Strokes, Babyshambles, Antony and the Johnsons, Low, Arcade Fire, Sun Kil Moon, the Decembrists, the Moldy Peaches, and just about every other cool-as-hell indie rock band that you want to keep to yourself and never let anyone else know about.
Christ, Mojo Magazine, the Rolling Stone of the UK, named Buffalo’s ShiShiMuMu (recorded as the Ponys in 2002) the 42nd best record of 2005. That’s just plain huge.
Still, when you walk into Buckdancer’s Choice and buy a handful of picks from frontman Jonny Balzano-Brookes, do you even know you’re doing it? These guys turn non-descript into an art form.
I’m here to tell you right now, though, that Phantom Buffalo are the best band in Portland. Hands down. For originality, variety, aesthetic, live show, delivery, everything you can think of, this band deserve the highest of praise. I’ve never made a statement like that before in these pages and I don’t care if someone gets a case of the sniffles because of it.
But all of that comes to naught without a little ambition, no?
The latest effort by the Buffalo, a five-song EP called Killing’s Not Okay, has been released by Portlander Nemo Bidstrup’s Time-Lag Records as part of a limited 300-copy run, each disc personalized with a drawing of some kind.
Three hundred copies? They should be able to sell that many in a weekend. Of course, there’s been zero formal promotion, other than some notices on MySpace and the Time-Lag site. It’s the same kind of calculated promotional attack that has www.drownedinsound.com thinking they’re from Oregon, and has resulted in a historical record that has their former name as, alternately, the Ponies, the Pony’s, and Pony.
Luckily, everyone who’s ever heard Phantom Buffalo’s recorded music or seen them live just about falls in love with them and they’ve managed to get pretty damn popular despite themselves.
Their New Year’s gig at SPACE was the show to be at, Jonny in his signature horizontally striped shirt sounding like Mick Jagger when he wished everyone a “Happy New Year” and paired with lead guitarist Tim Burns on a whiney-guitar “Auld Lang Syne” (I wasn’t there, but I saw the video). The fans bouncing up and down to their psychedelic riffs recalled a 1997 Phish show, and there is a little bit of “Split Open and Melt” to this band, a pop outfit that never seems interested in traditional pop song structure but kind of uses it anyway.
The first track on Killing, “What Makes It Go,” actually is a two-minute pop song. It’s just that it’s preceded by five minutes of psychedelia that would make the 1968 Grateful Dead proud: picked-out, spacey single notes, staccato and reverbed at the same time; big echo effects, crashing drums and Dr. Who sound effects. When Balzano-Brookes starts singing, noting “it’s been a long time until now,” I couldn’t agree with him more, but I’m not in any way bothered by the lead-in.
