BEYOND
THE ROTTING LEAF
BG's
12th "studio" album///...
Rec date: 10/2/1o
Rec'd by Jim Nipe in Harrisonburp, Va
Art by Eliza Childress
Songs:
1. The Banquet
2. Holy Water
3. Fife and Drum
4. I
Wait For The Eagle
5. Evil
6. A Million Years
7. Hellfire
8. Can I Have Your Brain?
9. Snakes are Cool
10. Beyond The Dying Leaf
BUY
IT ON AMAZON MP3!!
Buy a CD or tape!
Paypal $7 to buckgooter@gmail.com
or
Send 7$ to PO box 113, Harrisonburg, VA 22803
Check out the tapes:
"The Banquet" Visualizer:
SOME SOUNDCLOUDS:
Snakes
are Cool by buckgooter
The Banquet
by buckgooter
Review by Tim Greene of TASHA
YAR
Review of Buck Gooter recording, "Beyond the Rotting Leaf"
-
First time I heard Buck Gooter was in Hickory, North Carolina, maybe
four years ago. I ran. It was so god-awful loud and harsh that what
I then thought of as a father-son team had me retreating to the back
of the bar. The music was so gnarly that I was squinting as well as
holding my fingers in my ears, as some of the sound was leaking in through
my eye holes. But I also began to enjoy it from my safe distance of
fifty feet. Most of the problem that night was with the PA system and
the sound guy trying to mix them like White Stripes or something. This
is not a typical two-piece band, and Buck Gooter has long-since stopped
trusting sound techs with the mix. They mix from the stage now and offer
a single line-out to the sound man.
I learned right away that Buck Gooter is not a father-son band, but
rather a band formed by two friends. It is my understanding that Billy
Pratt and Terry Turtle met while working together at at restaurant in
their hometown of Harrisonburg Virginia. Terry was already in a band,
but he saw a certain spark in Billy that made him want to focus his
energy as a team with him. Terry challenged Billy to perhaps mix a little
singing in with his screaming, and Billy suggested that Terry tune his
guitar and drink less beer. A band was born.
Hundreds of gigs, dozens of musical releases later (on every format
imaginable) they gave me a copy of "Beyond the Rotting Leaf".
It's good, might become my favorite. Terry plays his signature Martin
accousti-mess very well. Over the last few albums, the Goot has really
gotten good at bringing in just the right guitar tone, where you know
it's a guitar, but there's exactly the right amount of squawk and pain
in the sound. And though Billy doesn't refer to himself as a singer
or musician, he's honed his skills to match perfectly with Terry's sound.
Not match, exactly, sort of wrestle with, on a sonic level, sometimes
Billy can be heard playing guitar as well, right channel in the mix,
as on stage.
On "Beyond", they sort of play ping pong on vocals, trading
off between Terry songs and Billy songs. That's not a rule, but has
become the way most of their music flows best these days. It's a nice
way to do things, in the way that the old Humble Pie albums had a mix
of Peter Frampton singing sweet and Steve Marriott getting ran over
by a car. Humble Pie was never as good with just one singer in the band,
and with Buck Gooter, a person might lean toward one singer or the other,
but either way, the break in styles from one to the other, whether in
the same song or from one song to the next, works very well.
Well, I wrote this review as the album played. I've heard it maybe five
times now, over a period of four days or so. I find it to be recorded
and mixed very well, best so far. All the harsh is on purpose. They've
found a dude for cd mastering ( Don Zientara ) who manages to deliver
a very hot cd without it ever being hard on the ears. He captures what
I think of as the best of the Goot's aspirations.
Certainly a biased review, as I'm more friend than fan, but I do like
the music of Buck Gooter, and I'm choosing Holy Water, a song which
Terry sings, as my favorite of this album. I often lean toward the Terry
vocals in the way that I leaned toward Frampton songs in Humble Pie
( how the hell did that comparison reappear? ) But Frampton needed Marriott
in the band, and in that way both singing styles are needed in Buck
Gooter. And although Buck Gooter reserves the right to run self-programmed
drum tracks during the live show as well as on recordings, they seem
to be evolving more and more toward Billy's retro-pad old-future drumkit,
as Billy's been improving his drumming in the great improv space band,
"Skittens".
The album's over. I recommend it and plan to bootleg it for some friends.
Peace.
Buy the album and attend their shows. They will treat you well.
Tim Greene
HENRY ROLLINS Played "Snakes are Cool" on his awesome radio show!