EHP 0.25: El Buzzard tranquilizante' del elefante' CD/10" [ purchase cd ] [ purchase 10" ] Pressing Information: 1,000 CDs 500 grey The latest rumblings felt in California, crushing homes and sending school children under their desks is not another West Coast earthquake. Its the devestation coming from the amps of EL BUZZARD! Featuring ex members of Californian legends MOHINDER and DUSTER, EL BUZZARD blare out monsterous riffs and a "fuck this shit" attitude, building some of the most cataclysmic and lumbering sounds heard since the hay day of the MELVINS. This six song release, with the befitting title of Tranquilizante Del Elefante (elephant tranquilizer) is a follow up to the bands self released, self titled CD which recieved praise from publications such as Alternative Press magazine. EL BUZZARD pound their instruments into submission, every once in a while allowing them to spew out a contorted JESUS LIZARD or ORANGE GOBLIN inspired sound, layered in impurity. One listen and you will be done. The CD version contains a video for the song "Pilar of Fire". TRACK LISTING: 1. Medicina 2. Pillar Of Fire 3. I Like It 4. Fatal Blast 5. I Got Shot 6. The Custodian REVIEWS: Centerfuse I think every single thing on this record is distorted. This is the first proper release for this ex-Mohinder band. This record feels way too short, I definitely want more. It's full of feedback and noise and the occasional heavy riff thrown in here and there. It's sloppy and dirty and sounds like it's clipping sometimes, and I love it. El Buzzard takes some very clear influence from King Buzzo and his Melvins, as well as Flipper and the stranger sides of Nirvana. It sounds like they put on one hell of a live show. Some parts of me wished there was a little more melody here and there, but that's obviously not what this band is going for. Hopefully they come around soon. The Big Takeover Magazine issue #56 (Kurt Orzeck) The latest onslaught by this murderous California quartet is a 10-minute, six-song slugfest which, translated to English, means elephant tranquilizer. Though decorated with gorgeous artwork, the noise inside is anything but ­ it's a nightmarish apocalypse. "I got no head! I got no teeth!" lead guitarist/screaming maniac Gene Nite spews on "Pillar of Fire," one of the few discernible moments on the record. Spliced-in voice recordings give the record an eerily realistic quality, as if these Beelze Bubs were about to fe-fi-fo-fum into your living room with some rusty farming equipment and go to work. Pick it up if you like the Melvins, Today Is the Day or testing your fear threshold. Wonka Vision Magazine issue 26 (Mark Whittaker) The dirty sweatshop of your local rock club is well in order and the band has been playing for a while. On stage, four guys soaked in PBR and their slobber, known as El Buzzard, have been pummeling away and want you to listen up. Or not. I don't think they really care. The reason these guys rule is because you are never sure as to what to do with them. Reeking of hash oiled stoner rock, early KARP and the sludge heap of an old garage, El Buzzard come at you with a fuzzed out drone flair of dirt rock that few can master or muster. The songs are loosely mangled tightropes of swill hall mockery and take you on a wagon ride to the local meat locker and shove you in so you miss third period. Perhaps the use of drugs is an evil one. This could be the result of much abuse and tonal demise from being loaded and staring at your instrument like it was some abysmal foreigner or perhaps taken the shape of a snake or your grandmother. The songs rise up, are here to appease and then quickly loom away as if to hide from the appalling matters of the outside world. See, when you are that creamed up from huffing turpentine, things feel and look different and if you do it for weeks on end you turn into a numbing ache of shambled manhood. Then you start a band and everything is alright. Prefix Magazine (Randy D'Amico) You’re really only guaranteed to find one thing on Tranquilizante del Elefante, and that’s that California’s El Buzzard doesn’t give a fuck. The follow-up to the self-titled debut from the band, which features members of Mohinder and Duster, the EP beats the shit out of you with its lo-fi, grunge-influenced, Melvins-esque, surgery-without-anesthesia kind of scary, murky, distorted, pummeling beauty. It’s one of those records that digs into you with dirty, broken fingernails and won’t let go. Tangerine Magazine (Glenn Tillman) Unsane Cutthroats 9 style hard rockin to the core noisy metal with punk energy and vocal screams from way over the top. Tough, tight grooves keep the bottom heavy while heavy riffs rip shredded holes in the air for the throat seering screams to penetrate the voracious volume of El Buzzard. Sharp metal edges cut through the jugular of every track. El Buzzard buzzes, roars, and tears your ears off with one mighty blast of power after another. Man, I want, I need, I gotta have some more of this. You need it, too. Great stuff. Enough Fanzine (Jan) This album reminded me of how beautiful elephants are. Not only by having a look at the elephant artwork, but also by listening to the music. Hugely and massively, with lots of power, the six songs on this CD/10” are trampling their way into my brain. Down tuned guitars, pounding drums and distorted vocals make up a cocktail, which reminded me of Unsane more than one time. Nothing is left of the former bands like Mohinder, where these guys used to be involved. Rather uplifting than tranquilizing! Ear Candy webzine (Mike SOS) Halfway between noise metal and stoner rock lie El Buzzard, the crushing California quartet hell-bent on fusing The Melvins, Black Flag, and Black Sabbath into a six-song, almost 11 minute affair. And goddamn if these guys don’t do an admirable job, as they deliberately cut the typical, drugged-out fat and cut right to meaty riffs like the one found on “I Got Shot”, showing that sludge rock doesn’t have to move like molasses to smack you upside the head. A quick, yet low-ended, jolt to the system, El Buzzard’s messy brand of metallic space rock is perfect for a quick fix. Count The Cost webzine (Ryan) I'm assuming that if one was to tell a group of crackhead-hippies to play "hardcore" that El Buzzard would be those hippies playing that "hardcore." Short songs with craploads of incoherent screaming and sludgy music that sounds as if it was recorded in a garage, just about pops El Buzzard into their little nutshell. In fact, this CD is pure dog-poop and because of that... I love it. Grade: A Stoner Rock dot com (Keith Bergman) Well, aren’t we ugly today? Not even eleven minutes long, and El Buzzard have got me feeling like I just woke up from a three-day bender, having vomited in my sleep, cig burns festering on one arm, track marks on the other, head full of hammers and pants full of shit, reeking of smoke, spilled whiskey and the stale crotch perfume of scabrous whores lingering in the air. Get the picture yet? Like a dirt-floor Neurosis or Eyehategod with a four-track recorder, El Buzzard lurch and stumble through six songs of apocalyptic, bargain-basement filth. Lo-fi as it gets, with the by-now-obligatory echoed-out samples strewn like broken dolls in a bombed-out orphanage, plus (un)healthy doses of scraping, screeched vocals, sick sludge fuzz riffs and a drum kit that makes sounds like mallets on soft tissue. The whole thing sounds coated in phlegm and lint and broadcast out of a broken practice amp about three blocks away, but the ramshackleness of the whole affair is part of its charm – indeed, it wouldn’t work cleaned up or made “heavy” in some shiny studio. Listening to Tranquilizante del Elefante is kinda like eating a mud sandwich in New Orleans on the hottest night of the year, and chasing it down with jellied gasoline. I’m still not even sure if I liked the experience, but I have the sneaking suspicion I’m gonna come back for more. It may not be as dangerous as the band thinks it is, but it’s damn sure twice as scummy. Impact Press issue #54 (MP) This is experimental, noisy, spastic, crazy, screamy rock. There are literally just screams in the middle of "Fatal Blast." Metal moments mix with more melodic rhythms to create a good mixture of genres and sometimes just a good mix of noise. My complaint: there are only six songs here and I would like to see what they would make this noise into as a full length. Collective online zine (Alex Deller) Music like this makes me think of dirty lumberjack shirts and the smell of unwashed hair. The kind of feral rock n’ roll hammered out by men with crazed, bloodshot eyes, dirt thick beneath their fingernails and dried snot streaked across the backs of their hands. If this isn’t the case then in damn well should be, because this is raw, primitive music without the slightest hint of delicacy or polite restraint, just a mudslide of riffs, crazed howls and brutally simple drumming that’ll kick out your teeth as soon as look at you. It’s heavy, sludged-out and frazzled in the same way the Melvins are, crunching through short, bedraggled songs that have no difficulty in reaching that ugly little part of your soul that leads you into three-day blackouts, bloodied knuckles and being hunched over the toilet bowl with strings of bile dangling from your lips. Extremely nasty, utterly unhygienic and likely to leave you with some unpleasantly itchy reminder of your dalliance come morning, but nonetheless heartening that in these days of boundary-pushing and genre cross-pollination the likes of El Buzzard are still lingering behind the times, pounding away hammer and tong to make music that truly fucking rocks and makes no bones about it. Marvellous. Peacedogman webzine (Two Tub Man) Lo lo lo lo fi! But in EL BUZZARD's case, it's a help rather than a detriment. It creates a manic, erratic feel to the music, reminding me of several things all at once; most notably a bull in a china shop. Excellent sample usage by the way. I'm reminded of the UNSANE crossed with a band like 16 or similar intense, smashing, violent acts. Let me just fill you in so you know the score. We get an oddball sample that would fit nice on a DYSTOPIA record and then the music kicks in. Tinker toy drum sounds a la CHROME, jagged guitar slashes that are extremely metal-influenced but played with too much abandon to be metal, the bass is just a dull throb, and the vocalist sounds like a tweeker they found on the side of the road in the midst of a meth binge. Each song increases the fucked up quality of the music and does a good job of making you paranoid. You can't help but want to do something out of control while listening to this. It does wear thin after repeated listens, only because it's a tough listen from the get go. If you like melodies and hooks don't even bother. They have done an excellent job and you can tell they spent time thinking it all out or at least just got really lucky. It's a rare day that something comes my way that I find it difficult to explain in a way that truely gets the point across. This is the musical equivalent of a dust head locking themself in a room with a large knife, talking gibberish and threatening to kill anyone who opens the door. From the intense speed and mania to the slow, sludged-out paranoia and all the odd effects, it really reminds me of a less spastic SUPRESSION. I'm really at a loss for words. I suggest you go buy this and smash your car into stores. Scene It All webzine (xGoelx) As I listen to California’s quartet El Buzzard, I suddenly form a picture in my head that I’m walking into a modern day speak-easy. With ex-members of Mohinder and Duster, El Buzzard is out in a league of their own in their album “Tranquilizante del Elefante”. Influenced by bands like Karp, Sleep, Jesus Lizard, and The Melvins, you can begin to piece together what this may sound like. Although only six songs long and around twelve and a half minutes, this album will snap you into letting it be played on repeat without any recollection of the amount of time passed. Like many albums today, “Medicina”, the first song on the album, begins with a sample. Unlike most, this song relates in a sense to the bands over all appeal of a foreign underground feel. The drumming is muffled, the guitars are strung all over the spectrum with a dust filled mutation to their sound. The album progresses easily into the fourth song, “Fatal Blast” with screaming full enough to fill your ears but high enough to give a reminiscent sound of 80’s metal. Filled with anger and a fuck-this attitude, El Buzzard definitely proves to be a band to listen to while in an angry at the world mood. With every song on “Tranquilizante del Elefante” having it’s own distinct sound, own roar of gut wrentching noise, and own individual samples, the last two songs, “I Got Shot” and “The Custodian” have to rank among the top. Although I know this is a third of the album, I had to list “The Custodian” due to awesome mixing of samples overlaid to steadily played music, something very hard to do. “I Got Shot” gives you one of the best glimpses into the musicianship of El Buzzard, the mindset that by cutting out all the fancy metal tricks and slow melodic buildups you can still create a sense of intensiveness. El Buzzard is definitely not a band to pass over if you are in an angry mood or while driving down the streets of your hometown at an insanely fast rate. These guys aren’t pulling any fancy tricks out on you during “Tranquilizante del Elefante” but they are still extremely bone crushing with their muffled sound. Many people dislike albums due to it’s under producing, but El Buzzard is one of those bands you could never imagine listening to with a picture perfect recording. If you’re looking for an album different from a majority of the punk/hardcore/metal underground records, check out El Buzzard and prepare for one of the best unknown bands you have yet to hear. Indiana Journal Review october 2nd-8th (Wade Coggeshall) NoCal's El Buzzard work fuzztoned sludgerock to stoned perfection on their six-song EP "Tranquilizante del Elefante."It's quick shots of downtuned frothing rock, the kind of airless, stifling sound and drowning decor that gives the listener a sensation of being buried alive or fighting a losing battle to reach the surface. It's mud-laden metal with unconventional rhythms and disturbing issuance like the lo-fi subhuman stylings of EyeHateGod. For more on that, watch the video for "Pillar of Fire" included on the CD, which depicts, besides live shots of the band, Barbie and her toy friends having a cocaine party. Troy Kooper's vocals sound like more than the equipment can handle. His and Gene Nite's guitars manhandle from the low end. Clay Parton's ramshackle drums are more assaultive than measurable. It's a bloody unsoothing digest of what happens when you intentionally overload your gear and throw in utter depravity for the kill. And it's good. Look for the full-length recording "Undercock" from El Buzzard soon. Under The Volcano issue #82 (Chuck Foster) El Buzzard remind me a lot of Karp, who were kinda a cross between the Melvins and the Jesus Lizard with a good dose of Hammerhead, which is why I immediately loved them. If you were into the 90's Indie Noise Punk scene (like I was) you'll really dig this CD; it's massive. the312.com (Dan Ozzi) This is the type of music that I imagine is playing constantly throughout the streets of Seattle. Although, I’ve never actually been there so I’m sure this is a very general view of the city and that I have completely stereotyped everyone there. Imagine Los Crudos crossed with bands like the Melvins, Jesus Lizard, and "Bleach"-era Nirvana. Lots of noise, lots of fuzz, little room for bullshit. Also, if you pop this CD in a computer, you also get to watch a sweet little video of Barbie snorting coke while Ken takes his pants off and hits the hard liquor. As far as videos about Barbie snorting coke go, I’d say this is one of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. Punk Planet issue #65 (Rex Reason) If you're gonna do the punk/metal/sludge thing, bring something new to the it - like these guys did. This alternates among heavy, artsy, and fast, and every variation is engaging and raw.