The Wild West aesthetic is notoriously sanitised, and it was perhaps most notably employed by Madonna in the video for ‘Don’t Tell Me’. If you watch it carefully, you’ll see that there isn’t a speck of blood. Not one single remnant of struggle. Hunky cowboys prance in a desert, but why is the desert otherwise so empty, Madonna? Who emptied the desert, America? “Don’t tell me,” say plenty of descendants of white immigrants.
On his debut album Buckaroo, New York-based artist Katzin also draws inspiration from Wild West tropes, though this is hardly the result of a marketing brainstorm. “This country doesn’t have the same foundation as other countries. We wiped out a lot of the people with ancient history who lived here before.” Facts, yet Katzin’s debut album is more concerned with a “fictional Western frontier” – an “idyllic irony” that provides cover for a genocide. McDonald’s in Khan Yunis, anyone?
The bass and ‘woo hoo’s on ‘Tightrope’ join in like mates crossing the threshold into the party, and the ending is plinky and Guillemots-like. So far, so content. Talking of plinks, ‘Anna’ is a ‘delicate lost-love song’ that features copious banjo until the final quarter, when the track becomes a space rock jam. On ‘Wild Horses’, Katzin tells us that “Tears are rushing out of / My orifices,” which, needless to say, sounds like a world of pain. However, you wouldn’t detect his strife if you only paid attention to the music, which is mainly a light two-chord strum, with a cock-strutting solo to finish.
On ‘Hope’, Katzin lurches from almost-whispered questioning to falsetto response. The track barrels along like a train through a dusty plain. ‘Wake Up Ruben’ is about a friend who was in a coma. Starting with jazz guitar and piano, the track unexpectedly becomes a lowkey dance banger halfway through, as if to convey the joy of finally being awake. St. Germain and Hot Chip will be listening to the bleeps and beats with attentive ears.
The guitar on ‘Cottonmouth’ is so rustic that bits of twigs might land in your lugholes, while what sounds like a knackered computer emits its last breaths. ‘Shortwave’ is a short track that starts a bit like Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’ and becomes a cacophony of competing voices like a stock exchange in a nightmare. On ‘All Hat, No Cattle’, Katzim recalls a trip from Georgia to Seattle and pines for the love of “black beauty”. ‘Cowboy’’s acoustic chords are chunkier than a box of Yorkie bars. Katzin bemoans the “shrapnel / All over the ground / It’s a warfare / And I’m part of it now,” though the chorus sounds as ecstatic as The Hold Steady duetting with Springsteen.
The title track ‘Buckaroo’ might have you daydreaming about picnicking on a prairie. “Saw a deer with blue antlers / Sitting pretty in the yard / Where we used to go out dancing / And play on our guitar”. Violin, banjo and trumpet jostle for attention while Katzin remains blissfully at ease. However, on final track ‘Nantucket’, he’s fully off his hammock and seemingly desperate to tell the world that a particular female is from Nantucket.
What does it mean to be an American right now? For Katzin, it appears to mean writing songs that are as much bedroom pop as they are narrative-driven 90s indie. The West is wild, but there’s sanctuary and freedom in music. “It’s hard to be proud of what’s going on.” True, unless you’re Katzin and you made Buckaroo.
Buckaroo is out now via Mexican Summer
Review by Neil Laurenson
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