By the time Tokyo’s Buffalo Daughter, a three-member group often considered part of the Shibuya-kei movement, a microgenre of pop music that flourished in Japan in the mid-to-late 1990s, arrived at San Francisco’s Cafe Du Nord on June 7 for the final date on their US tour, they were determined to sell their remaining vinyl merch. They didn’t want to have to fly it back to Japan.
Can you blame them?
Listen. When you bring random items from your house to a garage sale, those suckers don’t come back. It’s finalized.
The eminent band is known for its patchwork approach to churning up frequencies, which sees members vibe and riff off of funk vamps, short-circuiting seminal rock with moon-landing sensations. It was touring in support of double vinyl reissues of albums New Rock and I, originally released 25 years ago on the Beastie Boys’ cooler-than-you Grand Royal label.
On that Wednesday night at Cafe Du Nord, Buffalo Daughter proceeded to show the occupants of the club’s almost-sold-out downstairs environs how fortunate they were to be in the company of the band’s pinpoint eclecticism for an hour and a half.
SuGar Yoshinaga on vocals, vocoder, guitar, and synthesizer; Yumiko Ohno on vocals, bass, and mini Moog; Masahiro Komatsu on drums; and a fourth member whose name I don’t know, but who added off-kilter cheerleader-high-on-raw-sugar antics to the mix and also played percussion. The band alternated between songs from 2021 release We Are The Times and random songs from the two vinyl reissues. This animated hub of Gen-X creators blew through a set that included techno-pop, dub, club, shoegaze, and other less-defined genres.
They were scattering bread crumbs, switching between guitar-based arrangements and the slow march into these electronic compositions.
With all of that, the band found its congregation. Jeering, shouting song titles, and dressed in spiked and studded clothing, the assembled alternative music buffs were hot for the weirdo universe of sounds.
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Asteroid symphonies and grungy math rock arrangements moved this Wednesday night revival. Frank Zappa’s absurdist humor afloat on fast beats and distorted kickdrums, or spacious evergreen indie-toned jams that went on for miles. The band kept on creating a ruckus, and then calming it.
The set moved through the sputnik funk of “Five Minutes” to the mutant disco prowess of “Don’t Punk Out” to the upbeat power pop of “Volcanic Girl.”
This was a joyous romp.
So, by the time the band needn’t have worried about those records. But the time it arrived at the genial “Super Blooper,” with its calming drone atmospherics and a melodious repetitive guitar lick, those records had been snatched up by ardent fans, happy to make room for the coveted wax in their SF homes.
