(EDITOR’S NOTE — Please see our story below on the new album, "The Glass Eye," by Buffalo’s BOZO. The band is comprised of Christian “Chuck” Richard on bass; Jaxon Giovino, drums; Don Dzubella, vocals; and Bill Doherty on guitar. ‘The Glass Eye’ is out now on all streaming platforms. You can also follow BOZO on its Linktree HERE.)
The hard and heavy genre-mashing Buffalo band BOZO has absolutely nothing at all in common with the internationally renowned indie band, Deathcab for Cutie. So then why mention the two groups in the same sentence? Because BOZO, at the end of its excellent new album ‘The Glass Eye,’ brilliantly pulls off something at which Deathcab failed miserably 16 years earlier: closing credits.
Yes, we agree, this is a strange place to begin an album review. But in listening to the ending of BOZO’s ‘The Glass Eye,’ we’re reminded of how Deathcab for Cutie ended its spectacular album, ‘Narrow Stairs,’ which was a musical masterpiece only to have the joy sucked out of it at the end by a painfully boring and monotone reading of ‘Album Credits’ — a droning track that drags on for nearly three mind-numbing minutes.
Like Deathcab, BOZO also ends its new album with a credits-reading. But unlike Deathcab, BOZO’s take is anything but boring. In fact, ‘Clumsy Epilogue,’ as the track is titled, is read over a sinister groove and manic vocals, and grows gradually more insane by the second as it devolves from a traditional reading of credits to an escalating litany of ridiculous possible side effects one could suffer from listening to ‘The Glass Eye.’ It's simultaneously cool and risky, and that’s really our point here: We highlight ‘Clumsy Epilogue’ because the track not only serves as a perfect ending to a very good and interesting album, but because it also exemplifies and underscores the entirety of this record: Refusing to abide by rigid genre rules, BOZO is a band that does whatever it wants and lets the chips fall where they may.
“It’s an ‘is-what-it-is’ kind of a mentality,’” the band told 1120 Press. “If we're taking chances, we're not thinking about it. It's been an experiment since day one.”
Influenced by bands such as Kyuss and early Clutch, Helmet and Acid Bath, BOZO started off in 2020 as just a rhythm section before evolving into a four-piece. An amalgamation of metal, hardcore, psychedelia, stoner doom, grunge and sludge, BOZO is difficult to categorize. We keep coming up with the term ‘psycho-doom,’ but really, the band is pretty much a genre unto itself.
Yet genre notwithstanding, BOZO is a very cool band and ‘The Glass Eye’ — which includes three previously released songs and nine new tracks — is an album worth your time.
Like the band itself, ‘The Glass Eye’ — mixed and mastered by Alan Kanazawich — is irreverent and enigmatic, heavy, relentless and exudes an underlying current of daring artistic expression. At times, such as on the opening track “Road Salt,” it’s in your face. At other times, on tunes such as “Septic,” it’s moody and thick. And at one point, it even veers completely off the road to explore unexpected musical terrain with the surprising track ‘Ass Pennies.’
‘The Glass Eye’ is not only unpredictable, it’s never dull.
“We all have a lot of different influences and have the freedom to express them however we want in our particular parts, so (they) overlap to form BOZO,” the group said when asked whether there was a concerted musical direction on the new album. “We really don't aim; it's more like buckshot.”
“It's a relief” to have the album out, the band added. “It took a while because of our approach. Now we can get to creating our next batch of songs. (We) still don't know what genre we fit in with. But what's known is the results are now streaming and the listeners can decide.”
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