buffalo tom

Now they’re touring their seventh LP, “Three Easy Pieces” – nine years older and slightly wider than they were on the release of their sixth. The same goes for tonight’s crowd. At a warm-up date this summer, Bill congratulated us on making the midweek gig “when it’s so hard to find babysitters”. It’s a similar story this evening: during the zesty “Tangerine”, the dad-pit gets pogoing like it’s 1990, but soon abates as the chorus of creaking hamstrings threatens to overpower the PA. Classics such as “Rachael”, “Treehouse”, “Summer” are bashed out with the vim that befits them – even when Tom, resplendent in his bison t-shirt drums using brushes, he still sounds like Thor. But the fact that we don’t take Bill’s advice to “visit the bathroom” while they play songs off the new LP testifies to their enduring quality control: “Bad Phone Call” and “Bottom of the Rain” are as good as anything they’ve ever written. The highlight, though, is another oldie - Chris’s “Late at Night” - which finds him and Bill harmonising back the years as if they’d never been away. It just grieves me that so few people knew they were there in the first place…