The Propaganda Group - Adam Carroll

butterCUP
Hot Love

“Ambitious and eccentric, but never self-indulgent” -– Gilbert Garcia, San Antonio Current

“It would be easy to call a band like Buttercup ‘minimalist’, but the songs (such as ‘Downslide’ and ‘Parallax View’) are so much richer than that. Yummy.” -Matt Dentler, Austin Chronicle

“‘Art’ my ass. This is just good unexplainable fun.” - Richard Skanse, Texas Music Magazine

“...San Antonio’s closest approximation to New York’s ‘downtown culture’ ” -Jim Beal Jr., San Antonio Express News

"The San Antonio quartet Buttercup has made a living with off-kilter performances...the shows became so popular that a documentary on them, Goodbye Blue Monday!, was released last year... a little Neil Young, a little Talking Heads and a little crazy."
- Steven Devadanam, Houston Press

There was a time when being a Buttercup fan required no small amount of tolerance for guerilla art nonsense. You couldn’t buy a Buttercup record, but you could call frontman Erik Sanden’s “Dial-a-Song” hotline and hear a track a week played back on his answering machine. You could go to a Buttercup show, but you did so knowing that your odds of getting to see the band actually play a “normal” set were pretty slim. Sometimes you’d show up and the band would just play home movies. Or invite the audience members, one by one, into an office to ask them about their day, play them a single song and send them on their way. At one gig, you could only watch the show by staring down into one of four different 50-gallon barrels, each holding a TV monitor showing a different Buttercup member as the band played the entire set hidden in another room.

Buttercup called these weekly (later monthly) shows — invariably BYOB affairs staged at some dimly lit art gallery in downtown San Antonio — “Grackle Mundys.” No two were ever alike, except for the familiar faces in the crowd who showed up faithfully week after week like members of a secret society (the “Buttercult,” if you will.) Some — newcomers invited by friends or curiosity — no doubt came just to see what new performance art stunt the band would reveal. But those in the know came knowing that said gimmicks — from the inspired and wacky fun to the, well, confounding — were always secondary to the music. They’d willingly jump through hoops, walk under ladders and stare down oil drums to hear Buttercup’s songs simply because the songs were worth it.

Buttercup’s new album, Hot Love, like its 2005 predecessor Sick Yellow Flower, is the proof.

Granted, that name itself — Hot Love! — at first blush seems like yet another silly distraction. Or worse. The jaded and uninitiated will surely misinterpret it as a tell-tale sign of that all-too-trendy, irony-on-sleeve hipster bullshit that passes for cool in indie-rock circles these days. But any member of the Buttercult can attest that this is not a band that’s ever been overly concerned with being cool. The four members have far more important things to sort out, like where and when a chorus of “la’s” might work better than a string of “fa-fa-fah’s” or a winsome whistle, and whether any given solo is better served by electric guitar or ukulele. When in doubt, Buttercup doesn’t fret over “What is cool?” so much as the question, “What would Ray Davies do?”