Buellton - Biography
Buellton is a brooding four-piece indie-pop band based out of Central California, best known for the multifarious lo-fi 2001 album, Avenue of the Flags. Named in homage to a small-town above Santa Barbara, Buellton formed out of the fragments of the recently disbanded Brown in 1998. Originally a quintet comprised of Eric Herzog (drums), Cliff Hayes (bass), Andrew Giacumakis (guitar), John Nygren (vocals/guitar) and Tad Wagner (guitar/knob twiddler), the band wrote a batch of songs that would end up on its lone full-length album that spanned an atmosphere-changing gamut of medium-core, alt-country and dream pop. During the early-2000s, Buellton gigged up and down the West Coast with bands of their ilk, such as Radar Bros and Acetone.
Signed to the Portland-based indie label FILMguerrero, Buellton released the melancholic Avenue of Flags—another geographical reference, taken from an avenue in the town of Buellton—in March of 2001. The 11-track record would have been sadcore had it not blossomed into harder to define spaces throughout and contained subtle juxtapositions into breezy sunshine pop. Nygren’s soporific, coolly detached vocals recalled at times Beck going back to the Mellow Gold days with layers, and comparisons were drawn critically to The Flaming Lips, Low and My Bloody Valentine. The album was recorded in a warehouse/practice space that they called “Buonapasta,” using an analog 12-track and some ADAT 8-track. With the mastering help of Bruce Winter, they captured the fleeting sense of cinematic pop, psychiatric injury and hopefulness—often all in the same track. Standouts were the album’s opener, “Single,” the sedated “What Do You Suppose” and “Keepin’ It Real.”
Buellton toured the West Coast with the Radar Bros and Acetone in support of Avenue of Flags, but has yet to release another album. They did appear on a compilation called Happy Meals Vol. 3: Songs to Run Away From with the track, “Sell Blocks,” and Giacumakis (drums) and Wagner (electric guitar) contributed to a Santa Barbara Community Church song called “Under the Fountain,” which can be found on the disc We Have Hope (Santa Barbara Community Church).
