Lord Buffalo Expand Americana’s Horizons via “Dog Head” (premiere)

Austin “mud-folk”/psych-influenced outfit, Lord Buffalo release their latest album, Tohu Wa Bohu on 27 March. The group recently recorded a live video for the tune “Dog Head”, and the band’s Daniel Jesse Pruitt recently offered some insights on this rendition. “A few months back, we recorded an alternate version of ‘Dog Head’ for the Iron and Oxide series. We stopped into Breathing Rhythm Studios Norman, Oklahoma en route to a show in Tulsa and did a live recording straight to tape,” he recalls. “The session was engineered and mixed by Steve Boaz, and the song features Yamal Said on drums, Garrett Hellman on lead guitar, myself on guitar and vocal and Patrick Patterson on violin.”

Filled with majestic violin figures, steady post-rock rhythms, and haunting, American Gothic-inspired lyrical poetry, “Dog Head” offers listeners big surprises, musical catharsis, and a sense that this is a torch to light our collective way in times of darkness. At times reminiscent of Earth’s latter-day forays into the music of the American West, “Dog Head” is ultimately Lord Buffalo‘s alone. It’s a remarkable performance and song from an equally remarkable LP.

“This is a song from the new LP, Tohu Wa Bohu, and while the album version begins as a dark, downtempo piano creeper, we’d been doing the song live with an extended intro of bowed guitar and violin. Lord Buffalo songs often come out a little different every night, and we wanted to capture a little of that with this live-in-studio version of ‘Dog Head’. ‘Dog Head’ begins with a drone of bowed guitar and violin and the holds to the low road until the switch gets flipped and fuzzed-out guitar breaks in to end the piece with an exclamation point. The end gets chaotic, the song comes off the tracks a bit, but the heaviness feels redemptive, a release from the previous dirge.”