A wave of noise and harsh Kevin Shields-style glide guitar washes over as angsty lyrics consume the dark spaces. Soon, a droney bass guitar, melancholic and unforgiving, is announced joined by a wall of punk rock drumming. This is the world of Buzhold, a grungey post-shoegaze band hailing from Tallinn, Estonia. The debut album, What It Meant? sometimes feels close to home to the scratchy grunge of Nirvana’s Bleach era, like on the song “Decode” and others, but also the more bummer shoegaze of a band like Nothing.
There’s a ton of sonic disparity on this debut album, but due to the raw and present post-everything rock jams found between each song, it somehow works like a dirty, blemished puzzle. The stand-out track is “Shoe Case,” which loves to transcend genre, all with a lovely buzzing quality and that harmonized outro guitar riff, that seems to lose tuning as it soldiers on and makes one’s head spin.
“Morlort,” finds the band at their heaviest and doom-sludgy, relying heavily on that whiny grunge vocal style hugely popularized in the ’90s. It’s as if Buzhold found their favourite grunge singers and attempted to parrot them until finding a new sound on their own. Echoes of Alice in Chains, Mad Season, and Nirvana are here, and while it should feel like a mirror to a bygone music genre, with all of the experimental instrumentation, Buzhold remains stalwart. “Woven” is another high point on What It Meant? again featuring walls of guitars and enough murmurations to leave your head nothing but mush. Perhaps the only random out-of-place song is “Can You Share?” which seems to be about sharing fried chicken? It was the only time I was taken out of the chaos on What It Meant?. Either way, these guys from Estonia know how to make some illusive soundscapes, with riffs that stay in your head for hours and hours. Perhaps that’s what they meant?
