The musical spirit of Neil Young and Joe Walsh lives on!
The Buffalo Killers’ fourth album owes a serious debt to the laid-back yet compelling rock of these artists, with a bit of early Who mixed in. Everything about this disc, from the awful flower-power cover art to the 35 minute run time, is very much retro, less successful than the Black Keys (but just as much fun) in updating a classic rock sound for a new era.
These ten songs drift by in a pleasant haze, with nothing really jumping out but nothing worth skipping either. “Hey Girl” is an early highlight, suggesting a looser, less intense Neil Young And Crazy Horse. “Rolling Wheel” channels this same spirit with Pete Townshend-esque vocals to create a loopy, blissfully unaware piece of stoner rock.
The last half of the disc features the Gabbard brothers seriously channeling Joe Walsh’s vocals; it is uncanny (and distracting) how much they sound like the Clown Prince Of Rock ‘N’ Roll. Yet the vocals are a bit buried in the mix, letting the thick instrumentation of this power trio carry the day.
For a band so indebted to the past, Buffalo Killers is disinclined to break out of the limits they set on themselves and experiment a bit. An acoustic song, or some keyboard, or a different guitar tone, would have set these songs apart a bit from each other and shown the range that these guys obviously are capable of.
As it stands, Dig. Sow. Love. Grow. is a simple, languid retro rock album that fans of this sort of thing will appreciate but that never really transcends its origins into something vital.
