nothin Buddy Toth Releases Music On A Lark | New Haven Independent

Buddy Toth Releases Music On A Lark

Lapis Lazuli,” the first song from Buddy Toth’s LARKSPUR, opens with a sunny guitar and a soothing vocal that sounds just like the weather outside.

It picks up momentum with the help of a shaker and a little piano, as vocal and guitar weave around each other, but it never loses its sense of sunny idyll. Why should it change? In the same way that one can spend an entire afternoon under the shade of a tree on a warm summer day, once you’re there, there’s no particular reason to leave.

Buddy Toth’s way with a hook and ability to create a warm, inviting atmosphere are on ample display all the way through LARKSPUR, a worthy follow-up to 2016’s Sodium Flares that finds Toth expanding his sound palette to encompass acoustic guitars and synthesizers, organic and electronic percussion, and his own chilled-out voice to create a sound that fits this strange season combining near-perfect weather and the unease and malaise of a still-looming pandemic.

After Lapis Lazuli,” the album takes a turn into synth pop territory with Way Fare,” mining the winning formula of marrying dreamy, danceable music with morose lyrics. The music carries the suggestion that everything will be okay. But will it? We’re losing ground / on a slow drive across town / and I’m going out of my mind,” Toth sings.

Fairuza Balk” is a song built for a dusty road to the coast, from the easy shuffle of its drums to the triumphant trumpetlike sound after the chorus to the wistful lyrics that speak of sundresses and Coney Island and jumping fences and being at a time in life when you do things and you don’t quite know why, maybe because you don’t know yourself. Over and Out” returns to simple acoustic territory, while Jehanne 1985” marries that quiet acoustic song to more electronic atmospherics, making a sound that feels intimate and gigantic at the same time.

Take me out this Friday night,” Toth sings. I want to feel alive.” Amid the lush sound is a sampled voice that says what many of us must be thinking now and again. Nothing makes sense, everything’s crazy.” And then Ai Ai” takes it all out on a quiet, beautiful note, synthetic and acoustic sounds once again working side by side.

New Haven’s live music venues remain shuttered, and it’s reasonable to ask how long it will take for people to feel comfortable returning to them regularly whenever they reopen. We’re all still living in the fight-or-flight stage of this pandemic. Who knows how deep the societal wound goes, or how long it will take to recover? In the meantime, however, New Haven musicians like Buddy Toth are still creating new music, and we’re still here to listen, even if it’s just in headphones, by ourselves.

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