The music on Buko Shane’s latest album takes the serenity of the timeless fusion of folkish arrangements on acoustic guitar and a deep, rustic voice, and doubles it with meaningful words about some of the toughest times in recent memory and haunting compositions. Pandemic Blues is an arrestingly beautiful listen to sit through.
The latest album by Helsinki-based americana outfit Buko Shane is called Pandemic Blues, and as the title makes it clear, the music almost entirely surrounds the isolation, desolation, and fear that we collectively felt during the lockdowns. Buko Shane’s approach to expressing this isolation comes in the form of minimal arrangements that are mostly populated by just the acoustic fingerpicking and voice of frontman Heikki Hanninen, supported by a sparse palette of folkish ornamental flairs; fiddles, organs, and such.
Musically, Pandemic blues is extremely delicate. The skeletal arrangements introduce a sense of peaceful loneliness that is then exacerbated by the largely bittersweet compositional style that mixes moderate tempos with watered down tonalities that are just as major as they are minor, resulting in fluid musical atmospheres that shapeshift exceedingly well with the listener’s emotions. Pandemic Blues is a soothing album that will validate your feelings equally whether they be sorrow or joy.
Pandemic Blues maintains its sparse arrangements until one song before its halfway point. ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ is a delightfully dark piece of macabre blues with an atmosphere that I’ve never experienced in a song before. Drenched in layer upon layer of reverb and with a dramatic, bluesy composition with its fair share of horror elements, like the consistent wall of wailing string pads in the background, or the shuffling and intimidating drum groove. A truly unique song. ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ is not the album’s first moment of standout song building, ‘Another Sunday Morning’, the album’s starter, is another show stopping composition full of lush dissonance and musical surprises akin to Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker. ‘Another Sunday Morning’ showcases Buko Shane’s compositional toolkit in its most stripped down and charming guise. With a litany of color-injecting chords and an ethereal string part introduced in the song’s latter half, it is one sublime introduction to an album.
‘My Old Companion’ is another immediately catchy piece that has one of the album’s more twisting compositions and more nuanced arrangements, with the instrumental section, blending a foreboding, buzzing, and massive synth lead with a terrific acoustic guitar solo that intertwines major and minor tonalities in a particularly surprising fashion. But maybe not as surprising as the succulent saxophone performance on the next song over, titled ‘The Ride’. Probably the album’s boldest cut, ‘The Ride’ is a slow burning experimental piece that fuses a freeform saxophone performance with one of Hanninen’s more expressive vocal and lyrical deliveries. The song’s second half sees the introduction of a barreling, thunderous drum part that knows no rhyme or reason, injecting plentiful chaos into the song’s already upturned atmosphere. ‘The Ride’ is a daring foray into the most experimental jazz and noise sounds, showcasing a truly wild face for Buko Shane, and one that’s absolutely unexpected based on everything we’ve been exposed to up until this point.
‘Static Laziness’ follows the intensity of ‘The Ride’ with one of the album’s gentlest and smoothest sonic tapestries. The tenor saxophone laying some caramel smooth lines alongside a rich string arrangement and a thick, pillowy pad sound, all working together to alleviate the trebly nature of the acoustic guitar. A descending progression makes ‘Static Laziness’ a song that is consistently falling down to the ground far beneath. Buko Shane have excelled in creating a floating feeling with their fantastic arrangement on this piece.
Buko Shane’s Pandemic Blues is -without a doubt- one of 2024’s best releases. An album that is loaded with intent and purpose, with concepts that string the experience together lyrically and musically, this release is a masterful display of restraint, control, and pure, unbridled artistry.