Album Review: Dana Buoy – Experiments in Plant Based Music, Vol. 1

As if Mother Nature Decided to Make an Album

When it comes to viewing the cover art of Dana Buoy’s latest album, there’s no surprise that he chose to title it Experiments in Plant Based Music, Vol. 1, as each song becomes a portal of its own, each of them individually celebrating certain aspects of nature, such as plants, animals and wildlife. Here the vibes are exotic, and rightly so. 

If one is to stare at the album’s cover, they’ll notice the vibrant colors, the pink and green that are both so common in the wild. And obviously, there are those fern-like plants that hide a pair of solemn eyes hiding below them, eyes resembling those of the mysterious Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in the world-famous novel The Great Gatsby. All in all, it looks somewhat haunting, but what listeners will find after indulging the album is that all of it’s actually quite inviting, and steady in its soothing sounds. 

Getting to the actual content of the album, the songs themselves are musically and instrumentally rich. All are fraught with different kinds of particulars, truly granting each and every track a distinct personality of its own. That goes along with the overarching theme of what’s happening here, and what the album becomes by its end: a glorious tribute to life and nature.

All of the tracks are odes to various parts of nature which makes the album’s title that much more fitting. Buoy sings of African violets and the blood of dragons. Dwelling on nature itself is what makes this album so fantastic, too, because he’s supplying his audience with things that artists don’t really consider all the time. 

“Fear From Mind” is a great leadoff hitter. Spacey and psychedelic, one will have an easy time feeling like they’re floating on a cloud as the lyrics come together to form something similar to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” With an engaging guitar and a trombone, Buoy proclaims, “It’s never as bad, never as bad, never as bad,” trying to convey that fear in and of itself makes everything feel unfavorable, not anything else. Further than that, the song’s loud, reaching one’s ears as a piece of purity through lyrical precision, and by being a heavy instrumental.

Two tracks in particular, “Baby Tears” and “Dragon’s Blood,” have a distorted vibe, the former sounding like something a group of aliens would bring to earth for humans to listen to. Speaking of the latter, which is the album’s grand finale, it’s an ending that crescendos with much clapping, and with what oddly sounds like a rooster crowing on a lonesome farm in the early morning. 

Throughout, however, all is jazzy and bluesy, calming and groovy, and that might be something that’s shocking for an indie-pop album, even though it shouldn’t be. The best types of works out of this genre are those that are experimental, which is something Buoy has given his listeners. He’s also given listeners something that can rival anything created by artists like Mac DeMarco, perhaps one of the most dominant voices of this type of music, and hereafter only the sky’s surely the limit.