Adam Buxton – Buckle Up: Album Review

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Adam Buxton could really be onto something here, he clearly has the creative spark to generate material in bulk should he wish to continue doing so.

Each iteration of Adam Buxton’s long and varied comedy career has involved elements of music making.

Many long-time fans, who would know to call him by the nickname Buckles (hence the title of this, his debut album), likely consider the pinnacle of Buxton’s songwriting output so far to be his submissions for the ‘Song Wars’ segments of Adam And Joe, the radio show he presented with his comedy partner, the filmmaker Joe Cornish (also known as Cornballs).

For the uninitiated, it is worthwhile going down a ‘Song Wars’ YouTube rabbit hole to uncover such gems as Adam’s song inspired by Grazia magazine, Joe’s remix of the Antiques Roadshow theme tune and their separate attempts at producing a title song for the then-forthcoming Bond movie Quantum Of Solace.

As many have observed, both Adam and Joe’s efforts proved to be a damn sight more memorable than the Jack White and Alicia Keys collaboration that was chosen for the film.

Over the last ten years, Buxton has focused primarily on producing more than 250 episodes of The Adam Buxton Podcast.

True to form, original musical compositions are littered throughout, giving the show a strong sense of identity in an oversaturated market and lending each episode a semblance of structure entirely missing from many other popular podcasts (see those of Joe Rogan and his ilk).

Once listeners of the podcast have heard Buckle Up they will be able to recognise the former’s assorted jingles and irreverent mashups as blueprints for the songs on the latter.

One of them, entitled Have U Seen My Phone Charger?, is even transplanted unchanged from the podcast onto the album’s tracklist.

But the joy of Buckle Up — particularly for long time fans of Adam Buxton — is not necessarily in its individual components, but in taking it as a whole. For it was clearly made to be listened to that way.

The album sounds like the work of a decades’ long music fan who had probably fantasised about getting to make an album of his own one day and then suddenly found himself with the means to do so.

Although it was hardly necessary, there is a clear thematic structure to the way the songs are sequenced: songs about fatherhood are paired together, as are songs about aging, and surrealistic domestic scenes.

There are also generous helpings of different genres and their associated production styles, which helps the album to feel more substantial than its 34-minute runtime would suggest.

Skip This Track sends up country music, with Neil Young-style harmonica and scratchy Dylanesque vocals; Dancing In The Middle is a fairly plausible piece of glitchy synth-based post-punk; and Tea Towel is an ingenious parody of Bossa nova, with Buxton singing in a South American accent as comically exaggerated as Harry Enfield’s Greek character Stavros.

Even in his early days of relying on GarageBand samples, Adam Buxton’s recordings were always arranged to a high standard, with pitch perfect vocal harmonies and genre-specific instrumentation.

Now that he has collaborated with professional producers and musicians (Metronomy’s Joseph Mount for the most part, with input from Pete Robertson, formerly of The Vaccines), Buxton has been able to utilise others’ expertise to take his music onto the next level.

A fine example of this can be heard on Spiders, the album’s only instrumental and also, surprisingly, one of its highlights.

The track begins with a rough guitar recording, no doubt taken from Buxton’s original demo. Soon the guitar is supplemented with more professional sounding recordings of piano and synths, bass and a drum machine.

And yet, the song does not sound like a Frankenstein monster of a recording; it all fits together cohesively, with a strong sense of mood.

When the discordant harmonies being to unfurl the piece takes on a peculiar, somewhat disquieting beauty similar to the extended instrumental break in Bowie’s Aladdin Sane.

Adam Buxton could really be onto something here. From the panoply of ideas present across the 15 tracks of Buckle Up, along with the best of his miscellaneous songwriting efforts prior to recording this album, he clearly has the creative spark to generate material in bulk should he wish to continue doing so.

While he can turn in something as individually good as the charming and warm-hearted Pizza Time, which demonstrates both a comedian’s way with words and a songwriter’s ear for melody, it would be a shame not to try.