Buffalo Summer's Desolation Blue: cocky and formidable

Welsh rockers Buffalo Summer up their game on Desolation Blue

Buffalo Summer: Desolation Blue
(Image: © Silver Lining Music)

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Maintaining the production team from previous album Second Sun, Buffalo Summer are developing into an increasingly formidable heavy blues-rock outfit if tracks like Dark Valentine from this latest album are anything to go by. 

There’s a subtle Seattle-flavoured, noir-ish melancholia at work in the atmospherics and brilliant cinematic closer Pilot Light, otherwise it’s business as usual – strident, bold and passionate classic rock in the vein of Free, Whitesnake and Lynyrd Skynyrd, with guitarist Jonny Williams coming up with the riffy goods time and again. 

The Bukowski-quoting Deep Water, The Bitter End (featuring R.E.M.’s Pete Buck) and When You Walk Away all boast cracking choruses and plenty of cocky swagger, but it’s with tunes like the terrific Last To Know (featuring Buck on mandolin) that the band surprise with the depth of their songwriting. 

Desolation Blue surely points the way to greater riches still.

Essi Berelian

Whether it’s magazines, books or online, Essi has been writing about rock ’n’ metal for around thirty years. He has been reviews editor for Classic Rock and Metal Hammer, rock reviews editor for lads mag Front and worked for Kerrang!. He has also written the Rough Guide to Heavy Metal and contributed to the Rough Guide to Rock and Rough Guide Book of Playlists, and the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles (13th edition). Most fun interview? Tenacious D – Jack Black and Kyle Gass – for The Pick of Destiny movie book. An avid record/CD/tape collector, he’s amassed more music than he could ever possibly listen to, which annoys his wife no end.