Buñuel
Eugene S. Robinson's "other band" is now just his band
“Noise-rock” has never really gone away, but it’s definitely having a cultural moment right now. There’s a new Jesus Lizard album (which sounds like the Offspring to me, but never mind); Chris Spencer, formerly of Unsane, has a new band, Human Impact, that’s made two solid albums so far; Jon Spencer, formerly of the Blues Explosion and the glorious Pussy Galore, has a new record out (does eight songs in 19 minutes count as an “album”?); and people too young to remember those bands are really enjoying the new Chat Pile disc, which just sounds to me like reheated Tar, or the Cows if they’d ever put down that goddamn bugle. But even that’s fine, too.
By far the best noise-rock thing I’ve heard in 2024, though, is the fourth Buñuel album, Mansuetude, out digitally this week on Skin Graft in the US and Overdrive in Europe. (The physical edition will be out November 15.)
Now here’s a double disclaimer before we dive all the way in: I consider Buñuel frontman Eugene S. Robinson (he’s on Substack, too) a friend, or at least a friendly kindred spirit, and I have been a material supporter of his art for many years. By which I mean I have paid cash money for every album by his former band Oxbow and every Buñuel record, including this one. So am I “biased”? Somewhat, yeah. The question you should ask yourself is, would you rather read a piece about a band written by someone who actually buys that band’s records, or one by a journalist who was merely sent the new record, accompanied by a hype-sheet? Thought so. Onward.
Buñuel are an international group, which would ordinarily cause me to label them a project. I have a stubborn, Joe Carducci-esque belief that for a band to be a band it is necessary for them to get in a room and sweat through the tunes, that the creative process must be intimately collaborative for the product to be “real.” But Robinson lives in the US (for the moment), while the other three members — guitarist Xabier Iriondo, bassist Andrea Lombardini, and drummer Franz Valente — are all from (and in) Italy. (On their first two albums, 2016’s A Resting Place For Strangers and 2018’s The Easy Way Out, Pierpaolo Capovilla, also Italian, was the bassist.) And the musicians record their parts in Italy, while Robinson — and his wife Kassa Meow, who also performs and shot their first three album covers — record in San Francisco.
The first three Buñuel albums are all more or less of a piece. You could shuffle the tracks from A Resting Place For Strangers, The Easy Way Out, and 2022’s Killers Like Us together and each song would sit comfortably alongside the others. Some might argue that this displays a lack of creativity; I would counter with names like Motörhead, Slayer, Rage Against The Machine, AC/DC, and the Ramones. In other words, it’s called having a style, and it can be very much a virtue, when done well. In fact, I would argue that it’s what sets “rock” music apart from “pop” music.
Pop music is about building interesting sonic frames and backdrops for a charismatic vocalist; rock music is about four or five musicians who have made a series of we-do-this/we-don’t-do-that creative decisions as part of the songwriting process. That said, while every Buñuel song is more like than unlike every other Buñuel song, there are elements that make each stand out. “A Sorrowful Night”, from The Easy Way Out, has a really nice, swinging rhythm; “Streetlamp Cold”, from Resting Place, has that rumbling thump-groove that the late Steve Albini helped Nirvana, TAD, and others create; and “When We Talk”, from Killers Like Us, is their version of psychedelic doom metal.
It should be pointed out that Lombardini is a very different type of bassist from Capovilla. His sound is more like striking cables with a hammer — think Dave Riley of Big Black — than the blown-out roar heard on the first two albums. But the crucial elements throughout the Buñuel discography are Iriondo’s guitar and Valente’s drums. The drums are huge, with an almost physical whomp; his snare is like someone slapping you on the back of your brain, and the cymbals are mercifully low in the mix. The guitars, meanwhile, are some kind of miracle. The sheer variety of tones and frequencies Iriondo gets are on a par with a sonic wizard like Tom Morello, but all his ideas are mean-spirited ones; he wants to find “more tools to rape and castrate the audience,” as Joe Perry once put it (Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, page 26).
All that said, Mansuetude represents an evolution of the Buñuel style as it has been established over three previous albums. Each of their previous records has been longer than the one before: Resting Place was 28 minutes long, Easy Way 35, Killers 45, and Mansuetude runs nearly an hour. (On vinyl, it apparently takes up three sides.)
It’s also the first of their records to feature guests, and there are a bunch. Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison can be heard on “American Steel”; Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon appears on “Bleat”, and Couch Slut vocalist Megan Osztrosits on “Fixer”; jazz saxophonist David Binney pops up on “Trash”; Andrea Beninati plays cello on “Leather Bar”; and Timo Ellis plays keyboards and manipulates the music in other ways on “High. Speed. Chase.” and “A Room in Berlin”.
All those extra people wind up making this a very sonically diverse album that’s still recognizably the work of Buñuel. On “Leather Bar”, the squeals and groans of Beninati’s cello are joined by rattling junk percussion and long droning chords until the whole thing sounds like Boris jamming with Einstürzende Neubauten as Robinson bellows short, rageful phrases, sounding almost like James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom. But several other songs (“Drug Burn”, “High. Speed. Chase.”, “American Steel”) are built around hard-driving biker-rock riffs; “Drug Burn” is practically a Fu Manchu song. Denison’s guitar on “American Steel” is nasty, sounding like someone chainsawing through sheet metal as Robinson bellows, “I’ll drink/You drive”.
I haven’t said much yet about Robinson’s work on the album, or with Buñuel generally. His vocals here, and on their three previous records, are very different than his work with Oxbow. There, over the course of eight studio albums, a few EPs, and a killer live record with Peter Brötzmann, Robinson added one tool after another to his toolbox, gradually becoming not so much a “great singer” as a great performer. His role was — and is here — to perform the lyrics, to inhabit them as an actor inhabits a role and to sell the idea behind them.
The words themselves are impressionistic, dealing with concepts about modern life and maleness (as opposed to “manhood”) and the death drive and more, putting you inside these ideas much the way William Burroughs’ cut-up prose could get to the heart of an idea in ways more precisely crafted sentences could not. And sometimes that requires a harsh whisper, sometimes a drill instructor’s bark, sometimes a raw-throated scream, and sometimes two or more tracks of vocals as he seems to hover over his own shoulder, offering encouragement or self-doubt.
But Buñuel is not the Eugene S. Robinson show. They are a unit, committed to a collective task. And while they may record separately, they have toured, and very much become a band in full. (Witness the live footage above.) In fact, following the unfortunate and ugly implosion of Oxbow, they have gone from being Robinson’s “other band” to simply his band, full stop. Long may they roar.
That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when I will ask you to buy some music.