Buffalo Daughter -- Cold Summer

 

A few years ago, I put up an article on the rock band Buffalo Daughter. The particular song that I focused upon was "Oui Oui" which appeared on their 2014 album "Konjac-tion"（コニャクション）, and that one sounded more like a funk/pop tune so it went against the grain in terms of what I'd assumed their sound was. But perhaps that was the point by Buffalo Daughter...to be as unpredictable as possible.

My mind then wondered about the type of music that suGar Yoshinaga（シュガー吉永）, Yumiko Ohno（大野由美子）and MoOoG Yamamoto（山本ムーグ）were putting out in their very early days which began in 1993. So, after checking out their J-Wiki file, where I also discovered that there had been a fourth member, drummer Chika Ogawa（小川千果）, during their indies days, I saw that there was their very first album "Shaggy Head Dressers" from 1994.

I found one track called "Cold Summer", and yep, all I can say is that if Quentin Tarentino ever gets that final picture of his out, perhaps he can consider putting this one in. The Discogs website has a homegrown term called Leftfield to describe any album or song that is quirky and can't be easily defined. It's been used as one of the terms for "Shaggy Head Dressers" and I can certainly use it for "Cold Summer" which is a ball of alternative twangy film noir Western rock and some synthpop with a sprinkling of INXS attitude.

One big message that I got from "Cold Summer" is that the members don't really like cold winters. As a Torontonian who's been through one major snowstorm this season and several days of frigid temperatures (gotta another snowstorm coming in tonight), I can totally understand their feelings.