Pirate House Fans! Are you ready ... to talk at low volume, sit awkwardly in booths and smoke indoors? Well if so, then you're ready for Metro Bistro's Tuesday Night Singer/Songwriter Showcase on December 21st. The Show's hosted by the ever sleeveless and all around long-time badass Finny James and will feature Pirate House label-mates Thom Pennington, Tim Byrd (w/ neither people nor stones) and East Buddha! I'm pretty sure the whole thing kicks-off round 8:00 pm at Metro Bistro Bar and Grill located at 2125 2nd Ave north, Birmingham, AL, 35203.
And Fans, I don't need to mention (but I will) the bigness of this deal, but this is East Buddha's 1st official performance since the "Injustice Dance Party" Party and it's likely there won't be another til either the summer or this time next year. So be there like its your business!
Below is a show review of East Buddha at the Golden Bough Bookstore in Macon, GA from Fall 2007 to wet your appetites. It's gonna get intimate, ya'll!
Cozy Morbidity:
East Buddha’s black irony charms Macon’s most intimate venue
By Emily Hill
“This one is about a vampire cowboy,” Alex Mason says into the microphone. A couple of giggles break the “he-must-be-joking” tension, but Mason’s face is serious. There are three amps crammed into the corner of Macon’s Golden Bough bookstore where Mason, lead singer of East Buddha, sits on a stool cradling the curvy body of his acoustic guitar.
As he strums, he nearly bumps elbows with his brother and fellow band mate, Price Mason, who is hunched, eyes hidden under a baseball cap, over a bluesy Epiphone electric.
The two brothers ease into a cheerful, toe-tapping tune coupling Alex’s acoustic strums with Price’s Merle Haggard-inspired lead.
Alex’s voice is emotive and pleading, pulling us forward in our creaky wooden chairs to catch every shivering note of his vibrato. He could be singing about heartbreaking love or desperate loneliness, but no. The seductive voice entrancing us sings, “So I’m pickin’ off the stragglers and sickly ones/ They make not but a pauper's feast.”
“Too many people write about girlfriends and breakups,” Alex says. “I write about very weird, non-serious things in very serious ways.”
Vampire cowboys and garbage man serial killers, for instance.
The subjects are laughable, but when the macabre lyrics are layered under catchy melodies and Alex’s beautiful crooning, most listeners don’t mind the morbidity. This playful irony is exactly what inspires East Buddha. “These lyrics kind of usurp the archetype of a song. It’s not really so philosophical, it just plays on what we consider ‘beautiful’ or what we consider ‘art.’”
During the performance of “The Garbage Man Always Rides Twice” the strumming builds as Alex and Price launch into the bridge. Suddenly, the music halts. Alex’s a cappella voice cracks the silence – his neck strained, his expression pained with the crescendo – the audience is held spellbound. The words, “the truck is loud / but it muffles every sound” are hard to make out. The subject – a garbage man who slays people and hides them in the back of the truck – is lost on all of us.
“It’s like playing a joke on everyone, including myself,” Alex says. “I sing these ridiculous lyrics so seriously, but at the end of the song, I don’t come out laughing. I’ve created these little worlds, and I’ve spent a lot of time in them.”
The stories that inspired the lyrics are even more darkly comical. “Garbage Man” was conceived as Alex was in the car and a garbage truck roared past. “I think I was listening to music with the windows down or something and I just got pissed at how loud that stupid truck was. Then I thought, ‘A garbage truck…that would be the best place to hide a screaming victim,’” he chuckles to himself. Smirking at me he says, “Don’t worry; most people ask, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’”
The film noir feel is further encouraged by the concert’s atmosphere. Tucked in the back room of Golden Bough bookstore, the earnest vocals and bluesy guitar riffs of East Buddha pulse through the bookshelves and spill out into the street. The muted sounds of guitar strums beckon you inside the store, walls lined with antique and used books, the air smelling like turned pages and worn leather. Along one side of the room listeners sit cross-legged on cushions and upholstered pillows, their flip-flops strewn into the aisle. As Alex sings, the intensity is palpable, quivering like the hum of a monitor speaker. Outside, in the humid night air, heat lightening flashes. The intimate coziness of the room is sharply contrasted by the ominous sky and cracks of lightening. The juxtaposition is eerily reminiscent of the East Buddha lyrics themselves.
There is just something about that room, explains Golden Bough store owner Eric Wakefield. “The best word for it is intimate,” he says. “You can reach out and practically touch the artist. You just hear every sound. The atmosphere calls for quieter, lyric driven songs that would normally get drowned out in a bar setting.”
And that is what makes this particular concert so rare. East Buddha is habituated to bar scenes, large parties, and loud crowds.
“Usually we are really in-your-face. Sometimes I get the complaint that people can’t hear my voice, but that was never integral. It’s more about the music. I’m not a great singer,” Alex shrugs modestly, “but I can hit the notes.”
Nursed to maturation in the smoky, rowdy bars and house parties of Auburn, Alabama, East Buddha is used to a crowd that is more interested in head banging and PBR than soulful lyricism. At first the band was just a bunch of guys making music, “but we wanted to make it into something bigger,” Alex says. “We wanted to create a more solid idea, as opposed to just playing music to get chicks, have fun and get laid.” He laughs, “Although even now, we still don’t get laid.”
Describing the East Buddha sound as “experimental, pop, rock, a little folky…” Alex stops. “Journalists are always searching for that new phrase for a genre: proto-punk, queer-core, psycho-billy. They just like to hear the sound of their own voice when they invent those stupid names. In reality, most of the lines are blurred.” With influences from The Flaming Lips and Ryan Adams to Sam Cook and Tom Waits, the East Buddha sound refuses to be categorized.
Therein lies the beauty of the Golden Bough/East Buddha concert. Owner Wakefield operates the cozy bookstore with hopes that it will continue to be a “gathering place, a hub for culture and intelligence.” He muses, “A place like Shakespeare and Company in Paris or City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, that challenges the status quo, that will publish what the censors don’t allow.”
What happens in the low-lit back room of this downtown bookstore is a blurring of genres, a challenging of archetypes, a divergence from the status quo, a marriage of cozy used books with vampire cowboys.