The first three Grant Lee Buffalo albums were insular affairs. Together, singer/guitarist Grant Lee Phillips, drummer/percussionist Joey Peters and bassist/keyboardist/producer Paul Kimble fashioned a self-sufficient musical workshop as impervious to pop fashion as a sharecropper is to the vicissitudes of life in the big city.
On Fuzzy (1993) and Mighty Joe Moon (1994), the trio rummaged through the antique art-junk of America’s attic, dressing up their garage-folk with vintage instruments and rediscovering the ancient wisdom of The Band, the Byrds, Big Star and R.E.M. along the way. It all worked to wondrous effect. But by Copperopolis (1996) — a gorgeous but unrelentingly somber song cycle — GLB sounded as if those attic walls, once valued for their windowless integrity, were beginning to close in on them. Kimble was dismissed from the band shortly thereafter.
On Jubilee, Phillips and Peters treat Kimble’s absence as a license to cut loose. The maelstrom of crunchy guitars and brisk tempos that comprise “APB”, “Change Your Tune” and “My, My, My” indicate a newfound will to rock out with raucous abandon. (Previously, rock was something GLB’s music implied more than manifested.) Even those tunes emitting the dusky pastoralism of early GLB — “SuperSloMotion”, “8 Mile Road”, “The Shallow End” — show a bit more tooth. Producer Paul Fox sometimes equates tooth with splashy, pumped-up choruses (“APB”, Truly, Truly”), and after three critically acclaimed but commercially ignored albums, the band seems bent on casting a wider net. But Fox deserves credit for bathing the band in prismatic light, thereby revealing a heretofore obscured aspect of the band. (Indeed, Fox’s production is luminous precisely where Kimble’s was tenebrous.) And, for their part, Grant Lee Buffalo never sound compromised, even when enlisting the services of such outside guests as Michael Stipe, Robyn Hitchcock and the Wallflowers’ Rami Jaffee. No, they just sound like they’re finally okay with windows — open windows — in their attic walls. From: https://www.nodepression.com/album-reviews/grant-lee-buffalo-jubilee/
