Review KING BUFFALO ‘Acheron’

It’s only been a few months that King Buffalo released ‘The Burden of Relentlessness’. This album was the beginning of a three album cycle that now continues with ‘Acheron’.

The idea for this album series came at the beginning of the pandemic and in a way documents the mental effects of it. While at the beginning it was a grim resistance and the hope for a quick return to known horizons, ‘Acheron’ manifests all the woe and sorrow caused by the pandemic with all its aftermath.

King Buffalo limit themselves to four songs on the new album, all longer than nine minutes. Each of these tunes is kept rather quiet. There are rockier moments, such as on ‘Shadows’ where the guitars roar properly in the middle section. In general, ‘Acheron’ builds on spacier tones and longer repetitions, which can put the listener in a hypnotic state. And just as in the pandemic some messages are constantly repeated, here it is basic themes of a song that are celebrated over and over again with dedication. And when you’re about to give in to the hypnotic feeling, it’s hard guitars that immediately bring you back to the here and now.

I think that ‘Acheron’ is slightly better than its predecessor, which in retrospect certainly deserved a point more than what I have given at the time. Anyway, ‘Acheron’, in Greek mythology the ‘River of Woe’, shows King Buffalo from a slightly different perspective. Not that the band changes their entire sound. Rather, the four musicians mov within a broad framework, which offers plenty of room for interpretation and improvisation. King Buffalo use this self-set frame and while enjoying ‘Acheron’, some thoughts surely already circle around the third and last part of this well-done trilogy.