The Phoenix Foundation - Buffalo
- Written by Richard Seddon
New Zealand, Canada and Wales. They’re all little brothers. My sister can recognise a Canadian band from a mile away, there’s just something about them that sets her radar off. Me too actually, one of my few talents, another being if I can recognise a pilot, not by uniform, I can just tell if someone’s a pilot - Nicholas Lyndhurst is a pilot, I can just tell.
So, New Zealand is where The Phoenix Foundation hail from, and you can tell, I don’t know why, something just beeps on the radar, none of them are pilots either. If you’ve never heard them before, just think Mercury Rev - only replace the nursery rhyme melancholy with a cheery, dreamlike ambience. What The Phoenix Foundation does well is match instrumentation to each song - as you munch your way through Buffalo, your ears don’t get bored with the same flavours to each song.
It’s clear they enjoy deciding what sounds to use for each track, and there are plenty of sonic additives, like in ‘Orange and Mango’, which uses heavily reverbed beeps and clicks, delayed effects that swoop across the speakers, rich harmonies and double tracked vocals that must have taken ages to record, bless’em for putting so much effort into it. I bet none of the band can resist buying a Casio keyboard from a second hand shop for future use. With ‘Orange and Mango’ juxtaposed with the stripped down ‘Bailey’s Beach’, Buffalo puts forward a fair argument for listening to it as an album rather than sticking it on your iPod (other mps players are available, apparently) and hearing the tracks shuffled with the rest of your music library.
Dream-like pop, I’m all for it. Listen to it all the way through, I dare you.