Great Five Lakes

Japan's Buffalo Daughter has had fun at our happy expense since 1993, seeping into our delicate collective consciousness with Listerine commercials, video games, soundtracks and film scores, CD ROMs and other alternative musical techno media. Two previous BD albums on Japan's Cardinal Records, Shaggy Headdressers and Amoeba Soundsystem (released in '94 and '95, respectively), heralded the band's emergence as something other than an attitudinal gaggle of oddballs, although the music that SuGar, Yumiko and Moog make is still a far cry from what we have come to expect from a traditional "band." The title track on New Rock demonstrates their movie-music influence with the air of a credits sequence, revisited with "Super Blooper" later on down the disc. "Rhythm and Basement" reintroduces a funky balance of electronic and simpler sounds reminiscent of their previous Captain Velour Athletes projects. The breezy "Great Five Five Lakes" reassures you that the kids will be all right only until the album blossoms into its realized strange self with "Socks, Drugs, and Rock N Roll," "No New Rock," and "Autobacs." The Daughters have been accurately — and favorably — compared to the Slits, the Flying Lizards, Kraftwerk and even a riff or two as hardwired into all our heads from the Beatles transcendental White Album, which is all good news for the weird BD and their happy, weirder-yet fans.