Tom Rees has already managed to divine at least one essential truth in his role as writer and guitarist in Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard – that as the group’s bio perceptively declares (yes, in capital letters): YOU CAN LOVE OLD ROCK WITHOUT PASTICHING IT.
This is important, both because navigating the byways of tribute bands, throwback acts, back-to-their-roots collectives and ageing stiffs milking the heritage circuit is impossible, and because the Welsh quartet play rock and roll which sounds quite old, but also isn’t a pastiche.
BBB first arrived in 2018 with the prancing retro-boogie of Double Denim Hop, a song which, had it been delivered without lashings of insouciant tongue-in-cheek, would’ve resulted in the band being chased around their native Cardiff by a posse of irate Mojo readers. Unperturbed, they then repeated the trick with Late Night City, a vintage Mick n’ Keef jam about the ‘Sermons’ they run as club nights; hedonistic sprees that Rees without seemingly blinking says are all about, ‘trying to create a reality out of rock, religion and cultism’.
The quartet are hardly the first outfit in history to operate under the belief that they have the old gods of rock on their side (indeed, one of them is invoked on the stomping John Lennon Is My Jesus Christ), but rather than zipping up their jumpsuits and hoping for the best, The Non-Stop EP does enough to win over both cynics and zealots.
Given how easy sensory overload is to achieve in our daily lives, the somewhere-between-an-EP-and-an-album runtime means that there’s little chance of a welcome being outstayed. Two instrumentals in Theme From Early Morning City and Theme From Late City jointly offer some tapered respite, but the outrageous boogie of What Is Hate? sounds so wonderfully recherche, so joyous rather than in any way calculated, that the listener is forced to abandon any prejudice or cool points they’d been earning and just get down.
Rees has confessed to an admiration of Meatloaf, perhaps seeing himself as another performer whose character might assume the upper hand over his personality one day, eventually absorbing the other. And yet there is a darker flip side here, Long Day/Free Day finishing up in a crescendo and suddenly cutting out, while the epic closer Sugarloaf Mountain Crucify Me sounds like what happens when everyone just keeps having one more for the road.
We may like that, but we’ll love freaky, twisting, riffed out Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, denizens of a rock n’ roll circus which on Stockholm City Rock threatens to shake the place to its foundations, while Hollywood Actors is so built for the glamorous, starstruck big stage that it needs its own set of mirror shades.
Tom Rees not only knows the truth, on The Non-Stop EP he’s turned into something funky and fun, a total blast, but not just from the past.