Two years since their last effort, this third album shows Grant Lee Buffalo expanding both their ambitions and the music with which to express them. Again, this Californian trio lean ostensibly on images drawn mainly from smalltown America, but they don't settle for the typical smalltown notions. Instead, little things become metaphors for life's larger pictures. Likewise, the music has the usual array of instruments of a guitar-based trio but, with augmentation from piano, violin and clarinet, not to mention mellotron and Tibetan bells, it stays in contact with the seemingly typical but also steps beyond it.
And that's the power of this band. Leader Grant Lee Phillips has a knack of tweaking ordinary emotions into rarer moodswith only a little hyperbole in his voice. Behind this are his crafted lyrics - his attack on the ugly rise of the militia movement in Homespun is almost poetic. In fact, most of the songs are taken to deeper levels by neat turns of phrase. Meanwhile, the arrangements balance sombre delivery with the occasional buzzing guitar, often evoking ghosts of timeless songs, niggling but staying beyond recognition. Like sideways glances, this is an oblique but seductive album of uncommon pop-rock.