Jim Beal: Buttercup weird and wonderfully excessive
Web Posted: 05/25/2006 12:00 AM CDT
San Antonio Express-News

Buttercup's 'Hot Love'

Is it possible to overthink rock 'n' roll? Yes, indeed. Local heroes Buttercup provide the proof. The quartet of Erik Sanden (vocals, guitar, bass), Jamie Roadman (drums, percussion, glockenspiel, backing vocals), odie (bass, vocals, guitar, glockenspiel) and Joe Reyes (guitar, vocals, ukulele, omnichord, etc.) works something like carpenters gone mad. When Buttercup constructs songs, it builds, rebuilds, adds on, takes away, creates nooks, crannies and cubbyholes and enlists the aid of a cadre of eclectic friends, some of whom play — glockenspiel.

But, in the case of Buttercup, overthinking is not necessarily a bad thing. At a time in rock when genres are divided and subdivided, when bands in the biz for the long haul seem to be a thing of the past, when a lot of people seem to eschew thinking at all, part of the Buttercup thought process is dedicated to the notion of simply having fun.

During its storied Grackle Mundy performances, which have become part rock show, part art exhibit, Buttercup has raised the bar on presenting music and presenting a show.

With its new CD, "Hot Love" (Bedlamb Records), the follow-up to last year's "Sick Yellow Flower," Buttercup raised the bar for itself. The "Flower" songs rocked quietly with a lo-fi-meets-art groove; "Hot Love" rocks a bit harder but the quirkiness, the art and the experimentation remain. So does the fun.

Many things set Buttercup apart from other bands. There's imagination, of course, individual and collective, the off-kilter vision of principal songwriter Sanden, the sheer, varied chops of Reyes, the groove of the odie/Roadman rhythm section and the experience that comes from working together for years. Buttercup also has a formidable bunch of friends, MVPs ranging from studio and musical wizard (and CD producer) Mark Rubinstein to hot-lips horn players and classically trained string players.

Put all that together and you have "Hot Love," a CD that can catapult the Grackle Mundy sound, fun, weirdness and thought processes far beyond South Presa Street.

Buttercup will celebrate the release of "Hot Love" in fine style Sunday at Beethoven Hall, 422 Pereida St. The band will be joined by Hyperbubble and Not the Government. Rubinstein will play piano with Buttercup. Showtime is 8 p.m. Cover for the all-ages show is $6. For $15 you get a CD and get into the party.

Austin360.com
CD reviews - Tuesday, May 30, 2006
ButterCup
'Hot Love'

Of course it's an inexcusably cute band name more appropriate for a group of college sophomores than middle-aged men, but what's rock 'n' roll if not a chance to delay adulthood forever?

Once made up of performance art types, this San Antonio band — members of which have been kicking around S.A. bands since the early '90s — do what people do when they get sick of the art scene: They look for that most elusive of grails, the Perfect Guitar Pop Song.

The quest goes on, but "Hot Love" finds ButterCup on the right path. "Hello, Goodbye" and "You'll Just Have to Wait" snap and crackle, the title track feels like a '70s sitcom theme and "National Spelling Bee Contest" recalls fondly a crush's girlhood smarts. Tunes after tune, Buttercup (name. . .hurts. . .to. . .type) remember that structure is everything in guitar pop, wisely trading the goofy textures that bog down younger bands for the sturdy craft of long-time pros. After all, these guys aren't getting any younger and know in their bones that life is short, art is long (performance art even longer) but a perfectly written song lasts forever.

Texas Platters
Record review
BY DARCIE STEVENS

Buttercup

'Hot Love'

Let summer begin. Let the sweat drip from your face, the Popsicles melt in your hands, and the grass grow brown and brittle. Buttercup's sophomore LP, Hot Love, is the mood swing of a Central Texas heat wave: patient, longing, bouncy. The San Antonio quartet is more art than pop – as heard on debut Sick Yellow Flower – but this is a tighter, brighter effort. Singer Erik Sanden's opening Elliott Smith homage, "Hello, Goodbye," is sad yet hopeful, but guitarist Joe Reyes' "You and You Alone" is the strength of Buttercup. Its soft and lovely Beatles-like vocals swim under the current of melodic strength. Combining the titular track with "Cool Kids" pulls the Buttercup rock card, but the blended edges of "Egypt" paint a more delicate picture. Buttercup has become a puddle-jumper, leaping from pop to rock to Caribbean, but the irresistibly catchy "Johnny Appleseed" proves that everything comes home – everyone loves an oh-ah chorus. While closer "Unlevel" is exactly that, it exemplifies Buttercup's harmonizing abilities and musical strength. This is a band that grows more inventive by the week, and if Hot Love is any indication, it's gonna be a great summer.

Loving cup

By Gilbert Garcia

05/24/2006

Buttercup embraces the SA heat with a perfect summer-pop collection


Buttercup members Joe Reyes, Erik Sanden, a Jamie Roadman effigy, and Odie camp out at the McNay.

Two years ago, Buttercup made a decision that required local music aficionados to figure out what to do with their Monday nights. The group decided to scale back the regularity of their Grackle Mundy shows at the Wiggle Room, reliably unpredictable gatherings that found the band attempting such daredevil stunts as writing and performing songs on command, and playing a series of short sets for two people at a time.

Beloved as those shows have become, the band cut back for an important reason. As singer-guitarist Erik Sanden puts it, “We couldn’t catch up to the songs we were writing.” For a band as prolific as Buttercup (with gifted songwriters in Sanden, guitarist Joe Reyes, and bassist Odie), with a penchant for rich, intricate arrangements that take time to evolve, the concern was a real one.

Over the last two years, the band has consistently rehearsed twice a week on new material, and the full flowering of this labor can be heard on Hot Love, Buttercup’s sophomore release, and an audible leap beyond last year’s excellent Sick Yellow Flower. Working, by necessity, in piecemeal fashion, most often at makeshift home studios, the band somehow crafted a pop kaleidoscope that’s whimsical, melancholy, silly, and cerebral. Most pop music that aspires to be artsy is no fun, while most pop music that aspires to be fun is neither. Hot Love is one of those rare achievements that hits all the right pleasure buttons, while challenging your preconceptions.

A key difference between Hot Love and Sick Yellow Flower is that the new album showcases more upbeat material, such as the gloriously rocking “National Spelling Bee Contest,” the Turtles-meet-the-Flaming-Lips spirit of the title song (a conflicted ode to a new summer of love), and the relentless drive of “Contagious.” The band members say they attempted some of this material on Sick Yellow Flower, but were not yet able to capture their more rocking side on tape.

“I think with the first record it was right for us to go with the songs that were softer,” Sanden says. “We were able to do that better at that time. I think we drank way too much coffee on that first recording. The songs that we played fast, we played ’em like Muppet-Baby fast. It was horrible. It was like everybody was racing to the end of the song to see which instrument would cross the line first.”

The band began Hot Love by laying down Jamie Roadman’s drums at Salmon Peak Studios, ultimately adding some vocals when they realized that one of the studio’s mikes had been used by Elvis Presley. From there, they and producer Mark Rubenstein recorded the rest of the album’s basic tracks at Reyes’ house, and took Rubenstein’s gear to Sanden’s home for overdubs, which included layers of glockenspiel, horns, strings from members of the San Antonio Symphony, and even a jazzy flute solo from Rob Hardt on the bossa-nova-cum-rock track, “We’re Easy.” Finally, after Rubenstein moved into a new house, they took the sessions there for what Reyes calls “the last few sprinkles” of the album.

During the tracking at his house, Sanden says he was “deathly paranoid that somebody was going to break in with $20,000 worth of gear in my house. So I grabbed a giant tree and jammed it so the door wouldn’t open to downstairs. You’d come down the stairs, and there was a tree trunk there.”

Buttercup doesn’t shy away from introducing new words to the pop lexicon, and one of the album’s highlights, “National Spelling Bee Contest” is almost certainly the first American rock song to include “bellatrice” (an archaic term for “warrior woman”) on a lyric sheet.

“My girlfriend Saleta had recorded some of the spelling-bee contests,” Sanden says. “She likes to sit me in front of the television set and force me to watch stuff, to broaden my horizons. If it weren’t for her, I’d probably only watch basketball games, and have nothing at all to write about.

“There was one girl in the contest who had dark hair, huge glasses, and a little, tiny mosquito face. She was maybe 9-years-old. She looked exactly how Saleta used to look when she was young. She was cute as a button, but doing these strange moves like practicing by spelling into her hands and writing these fantastic motions in the air. Totally intense and strange. It seemed more like a war for this girl than anything.”

Reyes likes to say that the more successful a band becomes, the harder it has to work, and he believes that Buttercup’s strong work ethic over the last two years has elevated the band from a run-of-the-mill rock ensemble with good songs into something truly distinctive.

“We had to do this TV taping yesterday in Austin and Jamie’s out of town, so we decided to do it on banjo, ukelele, and Erik on this really rickety ’50s guitar,” Reyes says. “And normally we would have been like, ‘What are we going to do without Jamie?’ Now we can take those kind of performances and do them in stride, and have fun with it. We can reach that point, where you just sort of lose yourself in the song, much more easily now.”

In keeping with the band’s dedication to art for art’s sake, they choose to see the limited opportunities of the San Antonio music scene as a potential asset. “It’s a great place to incubate,” Reyes says. “If you have what I consider our goal, just to create good music, what a great environment: It’s cheap, you can afford to live here, and afford to spend more time doing what you really like.”

“It takes a special kind of mind to actually embrace the lameness of this town,” Odie adds. “It is very special. It’s all we have and that’s what we have to deal with, so you just make the best of the bowl of poo-poo that you have. You add milk, make it more palatable.”

Buttercup
Sick Yellow Flower

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. That seems to be the adage San Antonio's Buttercup uses to compose its clever indie pop. Instead of saying it, they hum it. They infuse vocal harmonies, lots of "la's," and let the music do the talking on 12 dynamic tracks. For debut LP Sick Yellow Flower, the quartet saves their lyrics for when they need them; most of the time, the bounce of songs like "Epithalamium" rolls along a choral texture. There's no better example than showstopper "John Glenn," which uses about seven lines in seven minutes to make a lasting impression. "Zero G and I feel fine," Erik Sanden insists over and over, the song launching into fits and starts of electric guitar and ambient vocals. 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.

HOME: JUNE 17, 2005: MUSIC: TEXAS PLATTERS

Texas Platters

Record review
BY MATT DENTLER

Buttercup
Hyde Park Theatre, Friday, Aug 26

“These San Antonio popsters refuse to play a run-of-the-mill show. You know the one: singer front and center making eyes at the audience while backing band rocks moderately. Buttercup’s always up for something new and creative…There’s just no telling what will ensue.”
– Darcie Stevens