When the Bills entered the American
Football League in 1960, Buffalo was the 20th largest
urban center in the country. As a lucrative nexus between the Great
Lakes and the Eastern Seaboard, the city was situated as an
industrial powerhouse in the pre-global era. But when America's
manufacturing dominance began to erode towards the end of the 20th
Century, Buffalo slid into disrepair and decadence (Right now, we're #70 in population). Without much
going for them, Buffalonians sought meaning in new forms, and a
vibrancy in the arts was the natural outcome (by the way, the
Albright-Knox museum will be curating “Wish You Were Here” this spring, an
exhibit showcasing the contributions the Buffalo arts community made
to the avant-garde movement in the 1970s, check it out).
More recently, with the city
consistently fluctuating between 2nd and 3rd
poorest in the country (and typically rating just as high on
“Drunkest City” lists), the trend of artistic intensity has
continued. Our music scene has thrived as well, and in the last few
years, we've spawned an abundance of great, creative bands.
Unfortunately, many of them have been as prone to disappointing
implosion as the Bills. Here's a quick rundown of some of the best
local bands to collapse in the last few years.
5) Vice Transmission
In the early days of Tight Pants Scenesterism, kids sought music that would reconcile their punk upbringing with their desire to straight-up dance. Buffalo's go-to for dance-punk TBAs for a while was Vice Transmission, a group as gritty as they were White-Funky. Fans of post-hc acts like Blood Brothers, Refused, and DFA79 (and who were weaned on sexless 90s radio rock) might remember the glory days when cool clothes and making out with girls became important parts of music again. In Buffalo, Vice Transmission was part of the soundtrack.
4) The Old Sweethearts
The last few years have been a period
of constant shifts in musical tastes. Fads and genres have come and
gone faster than journalists can add hyphens to their definitions
(remember how uncool chillwave got the minute someone came up with a
name for it?). That's why The Old Sweethearts were such a relief for
music fans in Western New York: they just played great, regular, rock
and roll, with touches of indie and folk that never lent itself to
trendiness. Farewell, TOSH. You'll be missed by show-goers and exasperated
writers alike.
3) Robot Has Werewolf Hand
The first show I saw when I moved
to Buffalo a decade ago was Robot Has Werewolf Hand. After quietly
setting up in the dim, dank 99 Custer basement, one of the vocalists came on the mic, like, “Hi, we are Robot Has Werewolf
Hand and we are going to play sixteen songs in fourteen minutes. Go.”
And the next fourteen minutes were an upside down, inside out blender
of noise and bodies. After an unsurpassable farewell show in 2004
(and a mega-snide song called “A Vote Against the Reunion Tour”),
I've given up hope on ever being thrown into such a crazy blender
again.2) Knife Crazy
Mathy, witty, and still quite
danceable, these guys were mad scientists at getting people excited
about experimentation. If you were going to bring some weird act into
Soundlab from out of town in the mid-to-late 00s, the advantages of
booking Knife Crazy to open were twofold: 1) their name itself made
show flyers “pop,” and 2) their angular, avant guitar-rock was so
catchy, they rendered weird-ass headliners “at least marginally
accessible” by proxy. Fans of both Don Cab and the Kinsella clan
were equally pleased.
1) Chylde
Buffalo is one beaten down and profoundly
drunk city. For a couple years, the uber-heavy, dive bar rock quartet
Chylde provided a perfect score of rust-belt blues for our
whiskey-soaked self-loathing – a genre still kicking in these
parts, but somewhat less intensely in the band's absence. After some
extensive touring, one bad-ass record, and fistfuls of wild local
performances, their break-up in 2010 was a serious Wide Right for the
Buffalo music scene.
fishs eddy/queen city knights
yecch. Fishs Eddy were god awful.
the tragedy in Chylde was that they were just getting good. Not that they weren't before, but the new material was pretty sick. However, you can hear a lot of that progression/progressiveness now in White Bison, just without the massive heavy.
Bloody Hollies, Tyrades, Baseball Furies, Trailerpark Tornadoes, The Rabies
Bloody Hollies are still together I think, they just moved to San Diego(?). Tyrades and Baseball Furies were amazing bands as well...although they spent most of their time in Chicago.
Emerson
Sleeping Kings of Iona