Donna the Buffalo

Silverlined

Sugar Hill Records

By Richard Gehr

You can hear nearly everything sad and beautiful and secret and populist about upstate New York-based Americana dance combo Donna the Buffalo in the first couple of tunes on their seventh and best album, Silverlined.

It's clear from the first cymbal crash of fiddler-accordionist-songwriter Tara Nevins's "Temporary Misery" that Silverlined is easily the best-sounding Donna the Buffalo album to date. Co-songwriter Jeb Puryear's pedal-steel guitar and (former) keyboardist Kathy Ziegler's Hammond B3 organ weave through the loping reggae beat like the dulce de leche in a pint of Häagen Dazs, interrupted only by a Cajun triangle break signaling the group's strong Louisiana ties. And that's bluegrass singer Claire Lynch harmonizing with Nevins in an upbeat song about emotional devastation and survival, the first of several on the album inspired (in the sense of a creative silver lining) by Nevins's divorce from former Donna guitarist Jim Miller in the interim between this album and 2005's Life's a Ride.

Puryear and Nevins more or less alternate songs, as usual. "Tomorrow Still Knows" is a typically Puryearvian meditation on the wheel of dharma, or the cosmic interplay of eros and thanatos, with images of mating insects on a perfect summer day followed by allusions to death and destruction. Bill Reynolds (also departed) unwinds a Motown-y bass groove underneath that syrupy pedal steel and Puryear's reedy tenor as he sings, "It's dark/ We must have somehow made it so/ Hoping what today has forgot/ Tomorrow still knows"--the first of at least two Beatles shout-outs on the album.

One of the great more or less undiscovered American roots bands of our time, Donna the Buffalo celebrates their twentieth anniversary together this year. Nevins and Puryear's relationship goes back a decade further, when they were drawn together by their mutual passion for Appalachian fiddle music. Although the pair essentially defines Donna's approach and sensibility, several other musicians have passed through the group over the years to help shape its sound. Switching between instruments and washboard, Nevins plays cowgirl queen to Puryear's modest multiculti guitar rockestry. The focus ping-pongs between them, double-helixing into a unique folk-rock hybrid.

Although the quintet made its reputation on the Northeastern granola circuit, Donna's music sounds equally comfortable in the cradle of Cajun country, a hardcore bluegrass picnic down South, or at any one of the many genre-erasing Americana festivals mushrooming around the country. Not to mention their homegrown bash, the Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music & Dance they host in Trumansburg, New York, every July.

Nevins blazes a more direct path to the emotional heart of things in utterly charming songs such as "Locket and Key," about new love, and the title track, which compares heartbreak to both a hardball flying through a window and a hurricane. "Why do you keep sounding like a broken record?/ My head keeps exploding like the day you wrecked it," she rails at her faithless lover in "Broken Record," a song as righteously (and rockingly) enraged as nearly anything by Lucinda Williams.

Puryear, on the other hand, tends to conflate private epiphanies--a new child ("Biggie K") and the importance of The Beatles (who once "cast a spell of impeccable charm" he would have us recapture)--with the whole big, messy picture. Nevins is descriptive, Puryear prescriptive. Although Silverlined contains nothing quite as logorrheic as "Positive Friction" or "Conscious Evolution," two of the group's more popular jam vehicles, it comes fairly close in "The Call," a discursive mid-tempo drama whose unforgettable refrain--"It's the eternal sadness from the great beyond/ Everything's coming, everything's gone"--picks up poignancy at every bittersweet repetition. Those mating insects are now falling dead, war is in the air, and yet the singer is blessed with a happy hearth and home. Go figure.

Like nearly every band that makes its living primarily on the road, Donna the Buffalo seeks the sort of affirmation for their songwriting skills that only a creatively and/or commercially successful studio album affords. Silverlined contains quality tunes without a doubt, and bonus harmonizers such as Claire Lynch, Catherine Russell, Amy Helm, and David Hidalgo (even if he did phone it in from Los Lobos' tour bus) lends the album more sparkle than anything they've done before. While 2001's Live From the American Ballroom may offer the best introduction to the group's "classic" lineup, Silverlined stands head and shoulders above Life's a Ride. Maturing musically and in nearly every other way, Donna the Buffalo is no longer a dark horse amid what appears to be an ever-expanding Americana whats-is. Silverlined could and should be the album that takes them to the front of the herd.