[img]http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drr300/r317/r31731qf8kw.jpg[/img]

[color=Red]Nothing Here Seems Strange [2012]Relativity Entertainment / NW6203[/color]

[img]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p180/SonAfterDark/tracklistlatest.png[/img]

1. Wolves and Owls
2. Fingertips
3. Blown a Fuse
4. Broke From Bread
5. Riverbed
6. Boy of Nine
7. Down in the Valley
8. Lynchburg Ferry
9. Oh My Boy
10. Body Count


Smoking guns won’t be found on Nothing Here Seems Strange, the third album by Buxton, yet there’s a coiled sense of alienation, sometimes danger — and occasionally doom — threaded through the release. A menacing feeling settles in with the declaration “I can’t believe what I have seen/I can’t believe what I have done” on opener Wolves and Owls and concludes with a fatalistic assessment of a pile of corpses on the closing Body Count. That these songs are two of the quietest on the album infuses it further with a sense of jarring unease.

Over the span of nearly a decade, Buxton — a Houston-by-way-of-La Porte band — has proven masterful at working with nuance, tension and contrasts. Which isn’t to say this is music of atmospherics but rather music based on feel as much as drive, a nocturnal sound built on the sort of serenity and surprise that comes with a nighttime drive through unfamiliar terrain.

Buxton’s music doesn’t lend itself to easy classification, even in its earliest, more primitive days. At one point in conversation, Sergio Treviño, singer, guitarist and banjoist, says “Almost everything is presented in a pop-folk style,” only to pause and laugh at the simplicity of the description. “It sounds like a description of Pete Seeger or something when you put it that way.”

Later, his assessment is “maybe somewhere between upbeat Americana through indie chill.” Again, his own description causes him to recoil a little.

“I just find more comfort in folkier, quieter music and not so much in heavier rock music. But once everybody adds their thing to it, we end up with something different, even something different than what we were expecting. And that’s almost always for the better.”

Bassist Chris Wise singles out Down in the Valley, one of the side two songs with a little kick. “You have Sergio finger-picking guitar the whole time, but then there are all these rock riffs thrown on top of it. We like the way those play off of each other.

“I think we get the most interesting results whenever we’re coming from two different sides and meeting in the middle.”

Those riffs are provided by guitarist Jason Willis, who also adds a half dozen instruments to the album. He, Treviño and Wise were the core three who came together in 2003 in La Porte. In 2005, they released Red Follows Red, which married Treviño’s “folk ditties” (Wise’s phrase) sung in a creaky, almost Appalachian croon to Willis’ serrated guitar leads and eerie xylophone parts. A Family Light followed in 2008, largely completed before drummer Justin Terrell made the band a four-piece.

Between then and now, Wise surreptitiously recruited Austin Sepulvado (“He was in the band before he really knew it,” Wise says) — who adds guitar, accordion, keys and harmony vocals — from News on the March to further develop Buxton’s sound. With Haley Barnes adding vocals and a coterie of local friends chipping in with guitars, strings, piano and brass, Nothing Here Seems Strange represents a richly textured sound by the band.

The album is notable for its patience, which goes a long way toward establishing a mood that sells it as a 10-song set rather than piecemeal singles. After the spooky Wolves, the band offers the simple piano-steered Fingertips, which gets a jab in the ribs from Willis’ guitar. Blown a Fuse and Broke From Bread have sturdy pop bones. An organ and piano on Riverbed, which closes side one, steer the song toward Bacharachian pop. The album follows that course, offering moments to savor Treviño’s sometimes surrealist, sometimes impressionistic lyrics that creak with an of-the-times anxieties about life and love that is too deftly vague to be tethered specifically to our times.

Choruses aren’t prohibited in Buxton songs, but they’re used cautiously. Similarly the big guitars come out only on occasion, elsewhere little graceful parts — keys, strings, a banjo or a harmony vocal — add color. The songs feel like short journeys, a quality evident on the band’s first record that has grown exponentially in the time since.

The songs started particularly bare bones, a set of demos made to catch the interest of New West Records, which signed the band early last year, giving this album greater distribution than the previous two. The songs have, in the time since, taken detours thanks to meddling with them in the studio, live performances and the band’s expansion.

“A lot of the things you’re hearing, the piano on Riverbed, that’s Jason’s ear you’re hearing,” Treviño says. “He’s got a lot of character when he does his thing. He’s extremely musical and he’s self-taught, so he has his own style. And Austin’s such a great addition for that reason: He knows music and understands theory and harmonies better than any of us.”

Wise: “Sometimes when we’re practicing Austin will say, ‘What are you all doing? What’s going on with this?’ ”

Treviño: “So we’re lucky to have both. Now we know where things should go, but we can be a little dirty and off sometimes, too.”

Both are looking forward to digging back to the first two albums to see the new things the current Buxton lineup can suss out of the older songs. And having lived with the new songs for well over a year, they’re eager to put a recorded copy in people’s hands.

“I like the idea of people knowing the songs when they hear us play them,” Wise says. “But this is such a great opportunity, how could we not be patient? The record has taken a long time, but if that’s how it has to happen, then that’s how it has to happen.”

-Andrew Dansby, 29-95

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