Gravedigging

Description

LP Comes w/ Standard Jacket & Download Card.

CD is Four Panel Digipack.

The Buttertones Gravedigging is more a movie waiting to happen than an albumor a soundtrack just waiting to inspire a movie, with scene after scene of action, tension and release set to a sound that takes everything good and true about American music before the Beatles prettied it up (surf, sweet soul, the boss saxophone-overdrive garage of the Northwest wailers like the Sonics) and matches it to punk energy, post-punk precision and the kind of personality that blows the circuit-breakers at a backyard party.

The Buttertones started their own journey in 2011 as three music school misfits (or drinking buddies, they say) in the heart of Hollywood, happy to learn how to to play, produce and perform but less excited about frequent go-nowhere conversations with classmates who had little interest in either the past or the future of music. So thats why bassist Sean Redman (also a former member of Cherry Glazerr) felt like hed lucked out when he found guitarist/singer Richard Araiza anddrummer/polyinstrumentalist Modesto Cobi Cobin: Cobi and Richard were the first guys I met where I thought they knew what they were talking about, he says. They had good influencesthey werent just trying to pander.

Their first rehearsals were in a Hollywood bedroom where Redman was living on an air mattress, then Araiza finally locked down Boettcherwho hed often see responding to the same casting calls as he didto replace another guitarist who was transitioning back to family life even as the Buttertones prepared their debut release, a self-titled cassette on L.A.s garage-pop Lolipop label. Then they absorbed sax player London Guzmn
(formerly in Long Beachs Wild Pack of Canaries with breakout local Rudy De Anda) after spotting him at a local DJ night, recruiting him for their sophomore album American Brunchand discovering the kind chemistry they didn’t know they were missing. Says Araiza: Were proud to be a legit band. Its a very collaborative processwe rely on each other. I feel thats rare nowadays, especially with rock bands.

When it came time to make Gravediggingthe follow-up to a special issue 8 for Innovative, which ended up pulling them aboard the label full-timethey knew it was time to go deeper and get dirtier. Recorded at Jazzcats studio in LongBeachhome-away-from-home to fellow Innovative Leisure artists Hanni El Khatib, Wall of Death and morein the spring of 2016, the sessions were supercharged with hard-won live experience from endless
street-level shows and relentless midnight-to-six rehearsals at the Buttertones lock-out, then focused even further by the insight and vision of producer Jonny Bell. (Jonny pushed us like crazy, says Boettcher. He had so many ideas all he time.)

Think of it this way: you might not yet know how the band that made Gravedigging is going to landbut you know its going to hit hard.