The American Buffalo

With bows to folk legends like Nick Drake, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen; waves to band-backed songwriters like Jeff Buckley, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney; and nods to indie contemporaries like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes, Nashville-based band The American Buffalo's debut album Reflections claws at the legacies it knows while standing, ready, to begin a parallel legacy of its own.

Conceived during principal songwriter Josh Edward’s short time studying literature at The Ohio State University, the album views itself in a vein similar to that of this earlier passion. The album is a storied, labored thing. It’s one composed of moments, felt and observed, by a young man concerned with the task before him: growing up. It’s a bildungsroman that inverts the legacy of rock and roll – and rather than liberation or machismo, its songs are built around returning to the inescapable duties of living. Absent is the rock god, the cowboy or the stud; instead, there is the gentle skeptic, one filled with heart and self-seriousness, who finds himself bound to what he knows.

On Reflections, Edward is joined by bassist Kieran Cronley, drummer Tim Weigand, and guitarist Jackson Badgley, who together comprise the core of The American Buffalo. Badgley also served as co-producer of the record, having mixed and mastered the final versions of each track. What was once a series of iPhone demos playing at Ohio State became, by each member’s will, a fully polished record. -Paul Kinsman