Found Sound: Laundry Room Leftovers
It’s a minor detail in COVID-19’s grand scheme of suffering, but I’ll miss the “stoop scoop.” If you live in a place like a Brooklyn, you probably own a few things that came from someone else’s stoop: a book, vase, pair of serving spoons, or CD in a box labeled “free.” It’s amazing, people are so challenged for space in NYC apartments, they would rather give stuff away just to free up a little space than go through the trouble of having a stoop sale or trying to sell online.
Well, that’s another piece of the city that’s gone now and will be… challenged to come back. Which makes the gems I’ve already discovered that way more precious. Like the Hummingbirds’s loveBuzz.
I’d never heard of this band nor had any reason to. I think they’re Australian. I’m not sure. You can find little tidbits online, but there’s been no great reclamation project to revisit their greatness. This is an obscure band that I’m sure has a passionate cult following somewhere.
My journey with the band started innocently enough. I was doing laundry in the basement of my Fort Greene apartment building. It was a sweltering day in August.
This laundry room had a long table built into the wall. I think for folding your clothes, though who would have put their clean clothes on this surface, I’m not really sure. I think everyone else who lived in the building had the same idea, because when you’d go down there, the table never had clothes. It was always covered with apartment scraps Books, mostly, but you could find CDs (CD-ROMs, even), the odd bootleg DVD, and a printer. Always a printer.
On this lucky day in August, I’m perusing the laundry room discards when a I see a CD with a decidedly 90s graphic treatment of the words “love buzz” on the jewel case. Actually, it was one word — “loveBuzz” — with some wavy and distorted graphic like heat rising off pavement behind it.
When you’re browsing music with zero context, blindly going off of whether the cover appeals to you, a scarce few cues are available to help you decide if it’s worth your investment. And by investment, we’re talking about a few measly minutes and a device that can still play or rip CDs.
Still, I almost certainly wouldn’t have picked up that CD if not for that wavy treatment of the word — or is it two words? — “loveBuzz.”
The band name didn’t really make an impression. The Hummingbirds could have been a bluegrass band or barbershop quartet for all I knew. It helped that it looked a group of bratty hipsters was on there, sure. But the real selling point was that “loveBuzz.” Why the lowercase “l” in “love?” There’s a clear aesthetic at play. I immediately thought of a jangly, shoe-gaze-y, power pop band in the mold of a Sarah Records band (not that I knew anything of actual bands on the Sarah Records label… it was more an idea of a sound). This is “candy acid” music, the kind the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, and Black Tambourine are known for. Sickly-sweet melodies struggling through heaps of noise and guitar feedback. The word “loveBuzz” had to be describing a sound like that, right?
It turned out to be way more fur than that.
The Hummingbirds had two of everything. Two guys. Two girls. Two guitarists. Two singers. I love a band with two singers. Two voices batting melodies and harmonies back and forth make an average jangly pop song rivetting. It helps that guitarists/vocalists Simon Holmes and Alannah Russack can’t really sing that well on their own. Objectively, they’re a little off-key and wobbly. But together?
When you get those unvarnished boy/girl vocals over their slash-and-bubble guitars, you end up with one of your fav all-time records. There’s something so innocent and kind of transcendent about it. It perfectly embodies the rush only a band can provide. Specifically a 90s tie-dye college rock band. You get a “loveBuzz.”
