Categories
GUEST EDITOR

Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz Would Not Be Denied: Mid-Century Modernism

Nothing if not a model of consistency, Buffalo Tom has been making the same decent-to-great music since 1992’s Let Me Come Over. Actually the Massachusetts trio’s third album, Let Me Come Over feels more like a debut, as it zeroed in brilliantly on the group’s strengths, namely the earnest, imagery-laden, acoustic-gone-electric songwriting of guitarist Bill Janovitz and bassist Chris Colbourn and the propulsive punk undercurrents supplied by drummer Tom Maginnis. Judging by the band’s latest, Skins (Scrawny), it’s a formula that still has legs. Skins is the group’s eighth album and second since reuniting after a 10-year (sort-of) break, and its world-weary lilt and been-there/done-that themes make it the perfect grown-up companion piece to Let Me Come Over’s reluctant coming-of-age angst. It may be the best thing the band has done since that LP. Buffalo Tom will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Janovitz and Colbourn.

Janovitz: Mid-Century modernism is all the rage now in popular culture. When it comes to the architecture, people tend to think of Chicago and the West Coast, and I would venture to guess that the image of stodgy New England would be far down their list. But suburban Boston was pretty much at the forefront of the movement, with Bauhaus co-founder Walter Gropius taking up at the Harvard Graduate School of Design after fleeing ’30s Germany. He built his own house in Lincoln and formed a pioneering firm in collaboration with a small group of young architects called, appropriately, The Architects Collaborative. They built houses and developed two groundbreaking neighborhoods in my town, Lexington. When Buffalo Tom put the band on the back burner and decided to focus on raising families and living a more balanced life, I got into real estate and specialize in these houses.

Video after the jump.