- Buzz Kull is in a time of flux, artistically shifting in a manner akin to internal, emotional forces crashing into each other. You can trace elements of it back to the origins of the man, Marc Dwyer, behind the sound. Not really rising out of a scene, not really finding a musical home in his hometown of Sydney, that feels somehow appropriate for a darkwave artist: underground, unacknowledged and unhappy. At the same time, 2017’s Chroma must’ve been a kind of revelation and unexpected, emotional reversal. After parting ways with his long-time collaborator, Rebecca Liston and nearly losing his debut full-length in a creative and contractual black hole, Dwyer turned it all around, forging a rewarding partnership with US based producer Johnathan Schenke, finding durable label support in Australia and abroad -from Burning Rose Records, among others- and receptive ears in town after town on his tours across Europe and America.
After listeners had to wait, nearly forever, for Buzz Kull’s debut, it’s easy to connect the sudden uprush of success with the startling appearance of his second full-length, only a year after the first. Yet, in the listening, it’s darker than even Buzz Kull’s own grim back-catalogue and it’s called New Kind Of Cross, what are we to make of that?
Dwyer draws on personal adversity in his music. The first single for the new record, Avoiding The Light, was directly inspired by a horrendous auto-wreck involving his tour bus in Germany. Still, this is darkwave: you can’t really write about how you’re in a much better emotional place now that your career is coming together; perhaps it was always going to be dark.
Nonetheless, Dwyer has talked about the isolation of touring by himself, saving money by performing to backing-tracks. “Yeah you rock up and have a beer with yourself, it’s like… yeah. My future preference would be touring with members that I’m friends with, that would make touring solo less of a drag.” I wonder if that informed the sound of the new record? It’s got an emotionally drained quality that comes on stronger than I was expecting.
I was initially fooled by the sweetly upbeat and boppy Destination. It fits quite neatly with the sound of Chroma, but it’s not what you can expect from most of the material here. The album’s title-track follows in tight formation, deploying an angular EBM that is unnerving as it is entertaining. The vocals are ground out, as Dwyer bleeds all emotion and tunefulness out of his delivery and like many a classic, aspirational goth vocalist, pushes on down from his natural baritone into a gravelly bass. The lyrics are minimal and opaque, which seems appropriate. At the same time they’re sexualised, grinding out the words “Body to body”, but also ruthless, “Nurture the ego” and finally, emotionally deadened, as the title “New kind of cross” gets chanted over and again.
Much of the record has this vacant quality. You might think a track like The Garden, featuring a duet with Modern Heaven’s Sarah Buckley would’ve been an opportunity for some sweet harmony, but you would be wrong indeed. The pair barely sing together at all and in fact they don’t even sing, it’s more like German sprechstimme. Of the few words they do share,“Do you know how to feel? / Give me something that’s real”, repeated and endlessly unfulfilled, seem appropriate. All of this matches a new emphasis on EBM, industrial and electro, but interestingly it’s the vocals: skeletal and bleached of colour which are the key to the sound; almost like Dwyer is making a an unintentionally strong and very personal, emotional gesture. As I said, these are all hallmarks of these styles and as such I’m not faulting it, but every now and then Buzz Kull completely bucks the trend. Take Ode To Hate, which for all the ferocity of its title has nearly as much tunefulness as Depeche Mode and an emotional immediacy that is captivating. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel about these new inflections on the Buzz Kull sound in six months, once they’ve had time to sink in.
In many ways Marc Dwyer and Buzz Kull are in flux. I don’t feel like the sound we hear now is the sound we’ll hear on the next record. If we’re lucky then much more material will come spilling out, just as quickly. As unsettled as it seems right now, it is equally, darkly fascinating and I want to hear it all.
- Chris Cobcroft.