Grant Lee Buffalo
★★★★
Fuzzy
CHRYSALIS. LP
A 30th anniversary celebration of their stark Gothic-country debut.
Dynamics-rich power-trio Grant Lee Buffalo made quite the impression playing Jools Holland’s TV show Later… in 1993 – and not just because of Grant-Lee Phillips’ waxen cheekbones. The debut album they’d hatched in a century-old San Francisco steel foundry incorporated choice elements: 12-string acoustic guitars overdriven to squally extremes, impassioned, sometimes falsetto vocals, and what Phillips has since described as “the old world churn of pump organs and parlour pianos.” Though you really had to see the trio live and Phillips would later trust in sheer craft as much as instinct, Jupiter And Teardrop, Fuzzy’s title track and the R.E.M.-like Wish You Well lend some credence to Michael Stipe’s contemporaneous contention that Fuzzy was “the best album of 1993 hands down.” GLB’s more ambitious 1994 follow-up, Mighty Joe Moon, is also getting a gatefold vinyl re-boot.