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Reflections. These are soft sounds, smooth from the graveyard of American giants, songs wrought from bone, from heart and from flesh. This is the language of The American Buffalo, and of the band’s native Ohio. This is a record that knows its name, and, like the band’s namesake, wanders, as if lonely across a prairie. It’s one of the few left of its kind while the bones go up around it.

Conceived during principal songwriter Josh Edward’s short time studying literature at The Ohio State University, the album views itself in a vein similar to that of this earlier passion. Edward frequently wrote poems and short fiction during his formative years, and a literary perspective informs much of what’s at work throughout Reflections. The album is a storied, labored thing. It’s one composed of moments, felt and observed, by a young man concerned with the task before him: growing up. Growing the fuck up. It’s a bildungsroman that inverts the legacy of rock and roll – and rather than liberation or machismo, its songs are built around returning to the inescapable duties of living. Absent is the rock god, the cowboy or the stud; instead, there is the gentle skeptic, one filled with heart and self-seriousness, who finds himself bound to what he knows.

On Reflections, Edward is joined by bassist Kieran Cronley, drummer Tim Weigand, and guitarist Jackson Badgley, who together comprise the core of The American Buffalo. Badgley also served as co-producer of the record, having mixed and mastered the final versions of each track. Initially recorded at The Bomb Shelter in East Nashville, sessions later moved to Badgley’s home, where the album was completed and refined. Badgley’s contributions are pre-eminent, as throughout its whole, the album is artfully rendered. It moves in ways almost delicate. Graceful in its measures. These are tracks that have mastered both the muted and the bold. They know when to sail and when to soar.

Though currently based in Nashville, this group of musicians emerged from Ohio’s various cities, having met one another in their high school and undergraduate days. Gigs took them this way and that. Cincinnati saw an early incarnation of the project before Edward moved to New York and pursued a stripped down, acoustic sound. Then Brooklyn became Nashville. So began again the practice; the reemergence of a whole; demos tracked; nights, in bars, as a band. From this process emerged Reflections: what was once a series of iPhone demos playing at Ohio State became, by each member’s will, a fully polished record.

Additional contributions from an array of Ohio and Nashville musicians – among them Jon Bostwick (drums) and Andy Smith (keys) – further add to the album, and illustrate the nature of The American Buffalo as an entity. In fact, Edward claims, “The American Buffalo isn’t a band,” at all. “Nor is it a solo project or a collective.” It is, instead, a music and art project in the wider sense, one by which Edward “intended, in some capacity, to express [his] vision of America.” 

With bows to folk legends like Nick Drake, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen; waves to band-backed songwriters like Jeff Buckley, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney; and nods to contemporaries, like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes, Reflections is an album of the times. It’s an album beyond the times. It’s an album clawing at the legacies it knows while standing, ready, to begin a parallel legacy of its own.

-Paul Kinsman