Los Angeles surf-garage quintet The Buttertones (bassist Sean Redman, guitarist/singer Richard Araiza, drummer Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån, guitarist Dakota Boettcher and saxophonist London Guzman) aptly used movie genres to describe their sophomore album American Brunch (2015), tagging it with "horror." "noir," and "western" on Bandcamp. Their sonic aesthetic straddled multiple music genres (garage rock, surf rock, jazz, proto-punk, soul) and a predilection for mid-century rock-and-roll that cohered convincingly into an album that could also double as an original soundtrack for a Tarantino-esque film.
Their recently released third album Gravedigging (2017) is similarly cinematic, invoking a sense of suspense, action and intrigue within a setting that's halfway between a crime-fuelled Southern California beach and a macabre Texan ranch. The band cite Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and The Gun Club as sonic inspirations, while describing the new album as "more a movie waiting to happen than an album—or a soundtrack just waiting to inspire a movie, with scene after scene of action, tension and release set to a sound that takes everything good and true about American music before the Beatles prettied it up".
When asked to describe the plot of the film that the album might be a soundtrack to, Araiza draws upon the riveting thrills of crime and romance: "A noir/western in a smoky dystopian Maui. Chizuko (Lucy Liu) is a private eye, hired by a mysterious wealthy man who identifies himself as Mr. Kimble (CGI Marlon Brando). He tells her to track down his nephew Frances (Richard Lewis) to bring him home to run the ‘family business.’ She accepts but soon finds out that Frances is working for the yellow-eyed coyote (Al Pacino), the same man that killed her lover Ann (Scar Jo)".
It's only fitting that a track like "Gravediggin" is accompanied by a cinematic music video with all the trappings of a dark western film. There's a criminal on the run, a scorching desert under an expansive blue sky, a beautiful Southern belle that first appears like a mirage, whiskey, a midday sexual rendezvous in a church, and an occult twist (no spoilers here). As promised, the band serves up the raw, kinetic energy of pre-Beatles American rock with a garage-punk twist. The atmospheric blend of explosive guitars, smooth vocals and heady sax spontaneously combusts into a wildly chaotic climax when the plot twist is revealed.
