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Buxton Courtesy photo
Hailing from La Porte, the band takes its cues from the Akron/Family-Okkervil River reintroduction of subtlety and eccentricity into the rock scene.
Sergio Trevino -- guitar, vocals
Jason Willis -- guitar, piano, mandolin
Chris Wise -- bass, organ
Justin Terrell -- drums
Austin Sepulvado -- guitar
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Buxton, 2004
Red Follows Red, 2005
A Family Light, 2008
Buxton has always been a compelling band. Consider Sergio Trevino's wild, warbling voice; deft instrumental work by Jason Willis and Chris Wise (recent addition, drummer Justin Terrell, rounds out the group); and the novelty of kids barely into their 20s experimenting with folk music to create something that sounds fresh.
The La Porte-based band's latest album, A Family Light, however, finally delivers on the promise of previous recordings, reeling in some eccentricities to reveal a maturing sound.
Trevino's voice continues its haunting ways, telling painful stories of bitter family feuds and women who leave. There isn't a single song that doesn't allude to the speaker's isolation, but set that isolation to a bluegrass tune (Westward) or a simple country rhythm (Joseph Collins) and it almost sounds like freedom: "I packed my things, headed westward / took my Strat, my boots and best shirt / and I left a note on my mother's dresser / explaining how I wish I missed her."
Light gets rowdy on Holy Water Revival, a searing cut that borders on rockabilly, and the gypsy-inflected, mandolin-heavy Blood on the Streets. Each Horse With a Name is a beauty, benefiting from fierce drumming and some sparkling guitar work. Bones, on the other hand, is a quiet, moaning song with a whisper of organ and unsettling imagery: "Bones in your car, lover won't you stay where you are / sirens seem so far traveling through the dark."
It's a disconcerting ride the whole way through. Disc closer Living Room — the story of an angry son burying his estranged father — also is the disc's darkest ("How can I respect him who thought of me as no more than a seed / and now the seed must bury him and tend his dying need"). It's the capper on an album that weaves heartbreaking tales and thoughtful musicianship with folk, country and indie-rock ideas to create an electric, exciting collection of songs.
-- Sara Cress | February 2008
Over-produce a song with knobs and filters, and you end up with the kind of ham-fisted, insipid stuff you hear on the radio. Where is the voice that shakes and the mystery between the notes? Where is the soul?
You might find it on the stage with Buxton. Hailing from La Porte, the band takes its cues from the Akron/Family-Okkervil River reintroduction of subtlety and eccentricity into the rock scene.
"I never liked hard music," singer Sergio Trevino says.
"We never screamed," bassist Chris Wise adds. He confesses that his mother made him listen to a lot of Eagles growing up. Multi-instrumentalist Jason Willis listened to whatever his father did, namely Elton John and Pink Floyd.
The band's inception might seem unlikely considering a rivalry that pitted Wise and Willis against each other in school: headbangers versus the preps.
"He thought I was a 'banger," Willis says. "He's with his friends, and they're like, 'Do you listen to Marilyn Manson?' and they start laughing. I was like, 'Who's Marilyn Manson?' I just didn't know what it was. We hated each other."
A teacher introduced the two enemies to Hacky Sack and the animosity melted away. Seriously. When Trevino showed Wise a song he had written, a band was born.
Buxton's opening steps in late 2003 were strange, the band says. The initial idea was to write songs without choruses.
"That lasted about a month," Willis says.
What they ended up with on last year's release, Red Follows Red, is a rambling, pretty library of stories anchored by Trevino's startling warble and Willis' twee plucking. Standouts include the fragile I Know You Won't, which owes much to Elliott Smith; Northern Lights, a glowing instrumental; and Same Mistakes, featuring a particularly breathless delivery by Trevino.
Even when Buxton's songs sound like sunny days, there's a glaze of sadness that the band likes.
"I don't think the music is ridiculously depressing, it's just somber," Wise says.
The guys blow off any notion that it might not be a great fit to open for hard-core rock bands. They say they've never gotten a bad reaction in Houston.
"A couple of nights ago we played with Deadboy and the Elephantmen and two other punk bands. It was not our scene, a bunch of punk listeners, but it seemed like they liked it." Willis says.
"People were, like, 'I've never heard anything like that before,' " Trevino says.
A club in Midland proved to have the tougher crowd.
"We were playing pretty well, but everyone just walked out," Wise says. "Except for my grandparents."
The band spent some of last summer on a Gulf Coast tour with O Pioneers! and will release a mini record with that band in the coming months. Buxton will embark on an East Coast tour this summer with electrifying, instrumental rockers By the End of Tonight. Other than that, the only goal is to keep getting better.
"I want to write music that can be timeless," Trevino says. "Like Wilco's Being There. That came out in '96 and it sounds like it came out today. I want to write the best music we can possibly write."
-- Sara Cress | April 25, 2006
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