Buck 65 - London Borderline - 13/3/04
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Maybe Buck's lying. Maybe he's just got a list of bands other people have told him are incredibly stylish, soaked up their sound, and is intent on name-dropping as much as possible in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. Gang of Four, Jurassic 5, Tom Waits, Woodie Guthrie, The Rolling Stones... suspiciously, influence-wise, the man '65 gets a tick in each and every box. We raise a suspicious eyebrow. Our nostrils smell a fraud.
And so ends the most misleading paragraph in recent literature. Fraud? Hell no, child, the man is a veritable visionary - not only keeping a sold-out audience on their toes, shapes-throwing-wise, but also with use of one of the most preposterously original, unpredictable collection/collage of sounds imaginable. At its roots, its hip-hop - but to categorise such an open-minded spirit as this would be asking for punishment.
He starts with the wondrous vital funk of perhaps his most famous effort, 'Wicked & Weird' - the 'starting with the hit' technique a trick supposedly inspired by a free trip to a Christina Aguilera concert, by invite of the lady(?) herself. See, he even name-drops the ironic pop celebrities too. You'll be getting the impression, quite correctly, that he talks a lot. It's another quality to the man whose mother calls him Richard Tefry that should be annoying, but somehow isn't. He milks the storyteller outfit wonderfully, be it on wry observations on life in various capitals of culture or often hilarious jokes of stand-up quality - we'd try and relay the night's Mick Jagger gag, but out of fear of not doing it justice, we'll restrain. Guess you had to be there. It's a shame more of you weren't.
But, and stick with us for the good part, there's a dark side. It's hinted at before it arrives, just in the husk of Tefry's conversational tone. There's something of the night to the way that Buck chooses to end every sentence with a wolf-like growl, something otherworldly about how he can turn the frivolous nature of upcoming single, '463' - a song about baseball, let's not forget - into a piece so unnerving. The comedy of the between-song-banter just makes these patches all the more bleak.
Of course, he goes silly in song too. 'The Centaur' is given a country and western dusting off; 'Food' from the utterly essential 'Square' album is the kind of thing this guy can write in his sleep; there's a simultaneous country ode to the aforementioned Guthrie and fly fishing; 'Wicked & Weird' is reprised as a thrash metal song to close the set; and there's something to smile at lyrically at the end of every couplet (i.e. 'Been walking so long, my legs getting wobbly/Don't throw your hands in the air, this ain't a robbery').
Buck 65 - eclecticism gone mad in the most robotically booty-shaking, side-splitting, brain-nourishing and glorious way possible.
Artists in this article: Buck 65
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