by John Brouk
Following on the heels of last year’s For Display Purposes Only, Buffet Lunch is now offering a brand new menu of quirky post-punk curiosities to satisfy listeners’ cravings on their brand new album, Perfect Hit!. The Edinburgh/Glasgow-based project has teamed up with Upset the Rhythm for an album that is less new wave and more rocking than last year’s model, yet still with the same levels of zaniness. This record is an all-you-can-hear feast of frizzled and frazzled erratic guitar-based slacker rock madness.
From the onset, the tone is set with the album title track “Perfect Hit!,” whose lumbering and trebled, independent noodly strands of guitar, bass, and vocals intertwine into a gawky and rhythmic sway. They form a cartoonish and novel sound. fitting together like the wavy edges of puzzle pieces. To further illustrate the intricacies of the group’s intermeshing instrumentation, the first half of the following track “Blue Chairs, Blue Floors, Blue Folders” is completely instrumental. Waves of doubled-guitar riffs wash over an upbeat tempo with bass for melodic measures creating a bright and surfy post-punk vibe.
The spoken/sung vocals deliver obscure and absurdist, seemingly non-sequitur lines about various blue nouns, hurricanes, and plumb-colored suns. Lyrically, the record reads like a surrealist stream-of-conscious hairball, a humorously-tinged and impervious jumble. The individual words themselves may not reveal much but the macro view of absurdity is what makes them enjoyable.
It’s not all guitars; there are synths and other instrumentation sprinkled throughout the tracklist to add some variance in sonic texture. On “Merchandise,” a cheesy organ provides sustained chords over which the angular guitar riffs can shuffle and dance. This particular track feels like Art Brut at their most tongue-in-cheek. Keys return in a big way for the album’s closer “(Function Suite),” a bleepy and bloopy instrumental that adds a bright ending to this off-the-wall record.
The album is filled with idiosyncratic moments, like on “The Local Void,” which switches back and forth between energetic, squiggly and frayed guitars, driving beat and rhythmic bassline that suddenly halt to a slowed trance-like slowed tempo that eventually envelops the track with fuzzed out guitar feedback. “List of Walls” is all minimalist wackiness, with eclectic instrumentation, and plenty of one-off sound effects that make this track feel like a skit from Sesame Street. The cartoonish and muffled vocals only add to this effect.
Buffet Lunch gives off a Wowee Zowie-era Pavement feel on tracks like “The Slowing of the Shoes” with the off-kilter and occasional falsetto combined with fuzzed out guitars, as well as on standout “Songs for the Quarrymen,” which may or may not be an ode to the Fab Four precursors. Another favorite is the sing-along melody of “King Conker,” which features Jack Lee for good measure.
All-in-all, Buffet Lunch has delivered an energetic and cheeky take on post-punk and slacker rock on their newest record. Sometimes life is too absurd not to let out a laugh, and Perfect Hit! is a perfect fit to a world that doesn’t seem to make much sense.