Boston alt-rock vets Buffalo Tom are gearing up to release Jump Rope, their 10th album in a nearly 40-year career. For it, they re-teamed with producer David Minehan, who produced 2018’s Quiet and Peace, and recorded at his Woolly Mammoth studios with additional help from John Agnello.
The album features frontman Bill Janovitz on acoustic guitar, but there are lots of loud electrics, too. “I think most of this new Buffalo Tom album Jump Rope was written during the pandemic years,”Janovitz tells us. “Chris [Colbourn, bass] and I would send out songs we had written and, as usual, they were recorded mostly with acoustic guitars. When we were finally safe to be back in a rehearsal room together, we had decided to work on the songs with a quiet and acoustic foundation, with the intention of making a record that more or less stayed in that vibe. Generally, we do not plan out how a record will sound in a general sense; we just let the songs point the way for what textures and production approach they might call for. But in this case, it was almost like we would make a campfire record, with minimal overdubs, less on the big-rock-guitar approach. But as with most things in Buffalo Tom, we have a chemistry and a natural sound that emerges no matter how we try to manipulate it.”
The first single from Jump Rope is the ringing “Helmet,” which Janovitz calls a prime example of Buffalo Tom’s unique chemistry, saying it’s “a song that could be at home on any of our previous records, but I associate it mostly with the layered crisp sounds of Big Red Letter Day.” Janovitz also says the song begins with an old inside joke. “Some old college friends and I would mock old adventure movies when we were high, trying to outdo each other with ridiculous variations on ‘Put your safety belts on, kids, because we’re about to go through HELL,’ and then take a bong hit. But the content of the song itself is far more serious, maybe even dire.”
You can watch the video for “Helmet,” which premieres in this post, below.
Buffalo Tom play a sold-out NYC show at Bowery Ballroom on January 13.
