Depending on the route, it can take up to two hours on public transit to get from Staten Island to Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium, the vital recording space and all-ages venue that’s served as home base for a seemingly endless supply of fantastic, angsty bands touting advanced degrees in the liberal arts and well-worn copies of Pink Flag. But Bueno, the quintet of Italian-American Shea Stadium regulars whose “C-C-C-Convenient” video we’re premiering today, make keeping it local in Staten Island an asset.
After all, being from the forgotten borough means not having to worry about convention. You can be a punk band who does jazz solos on Staten Island. You can do it in Brooklyn, too (as Pill have most recently shown), but Bueno honed their sound playing for packed houses buried deep within the Island. As such, everything about “C-C-C-Convenient” feels hyperlocal. Not in the geographical sense—the Convenient Food Mart that appears at the beginning of the video certainly isn’t the grocery chain’s only storefront—but in the sense that singer Luke Chiarrutini sounds like he’s plotting the locations of his personal neuroses and then reading back the ensuing map. “I think I’ll make a salsa, I think I’ll get a burrito, I think I’ll fill my life with tasks that take about 30 minutes to complete” he speak-sings over a choppy guitar line lifted from the Minutemen’s “Toadies.” He caps the half-serious singsongy chorus with an earnest, away-from-the-mic “Ah, fuck” that lets you know just how serious that chorus was, all while guitarists Mike DiBenedetto and Mikey Gagliardi steer their separate grooves head-on into one another.
“C-C-C-Convenient” was recorded live at Shea Stadium BK and is being released by the venue as the b-side to the group’s “Assed Out,” which contains an immortal line about “making love like George Constanza” and which you can also hear below.
Bueno’s “Assed Out” 7″ is available 7/9 on Shea Stadium Records.
