San Antonio, Texas is not the place you might expect an art rock band to hail from but Buttercup counts the place as its hometown. The band is set to drop their new album, Battle Of Flowers, on Friday via Bedlamb Records, and I'm here to tell you about why you should be interested in this fine record.
Album opener "Let It Drop" pops and crackles with a kind of wit, while the lovely "Acting Through Music" travels territory once occupied by artists as disparate as Todd Rundgren and Jellyfish. "How To Think More About Sex" recalls both Big Dipper a bit even as the title and POV nod in the direction of The Embarrassment, while the languid-but-beautiful "Vicious Rewind" made me think of Beulah and Camper Van Beethoven. The ghost of Eighties college rock rises again on the peppy "Henry B. Gonzalez" and the catchy "68 Playmate", both numbers that seem comparable to a lot of the best stuff cranked out by King Missile and Too Much Joy in an earlier decade.
If the music of Buttercup is hard to describe, that's a sign that the band is doing something right. Battle Of Flowers bridges a few genres with ease while offering up something fresh and full of spark. Witty without being too silly, melodic without being sappy, the tunes here from Buttercup are uniformly well-crafted and infectious and that's a pretty good reason to seek out Battle Of Flowers when you can.
Battle Of Flowers by Buttercup is out on Friday via Bedlamb Records. More details on Buttercup via the band's official website.
[Photo: Mark Greenberg]