Luis Buñuel was a Spanish-Mexican director whose avant-garde, surrealist films continue to be challenging and boundary-pushing even 40 years after his death. His legacy also lives on courtesy of the noise-rock/post-punk band Buñuel, fronted by Eugene S. Robinson. A little over a year ago, the singular vocalist gifted us with a track-by-track breakdown of Love’s Holiday, which turned out to be the swan song from his better-known but equally intimidating project, Oxbow. He’s doing us the courtesy again today, this time with Buñuel bassist Andrea Lombardini, to help us dissect the band’s brand-new missive, Mansuetude.
Meticulously guiding us through the release, Robinson explains how an encounter with Allen Ginsberg, social critic and war historian Paul Fussell, the Hells Angels—and the tango—all informed Buñuel’s Mansuetude. Meanwhile, Lombardini points out how the album picks up where the band’s ambitious trilogy of A Resting Place for Strangers, The Easy Way Out, and Killers Like Us ended two years ago—while also noting guest appearances across the album by heavy-music luminaries including Jacob Bannon of Converge, Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison (who also touched base with FLOOD recently), and Megan Osztrosits of Couch Slut.
Enjoy this road map to Mansuetude, which will help you digest one of the toughest yet most intellectually rewarding listens we’ve encountered this year. The digital version of the full-length drops today via Skin Graft Records, which you can stream below, while the physical version is slated for a November 15 release. Both are available to purchase on Buñuel’s Bandcamp page.
1. “Who Missed Me”
Eugene S. Robinson: My breakdowns will be primarily lyrical, since my vocal contribution is also both vocal and driven by a narrative line. The tendency and trend here is to make the lyric personal and then general enough to be not easily pegged as being about this. Or that. The reason for this is like Allen Ginsberg once said to me: “Dharma gates are endless,” and meaning might be found anywhere—even outside of its intended structure. So on the face of it, this song is about the temporariness of our mortal coils. In reality I imagine it’s about the death of my father, a bigger piece of shit I have not known, whose world view seems to have been constructed along the lines of expressed concern for him. The song, then, is a tribute to me not needing at all the same baby food it’s clear he survived on.
Andrea Lombardini: This track marks the connection with the trilogy, beginning with a mood similar to the ending of Killers Like Us but changes abruptly, touching different musical genres, alternating and overlapping sounds, melodies, and rhythms like a mad radio station.
2. “Drug Burn”
Eugene: The Hells Angels as one of their bylaws used to maintain that one of their hard, fast rules was “no drug burns.” Read this as you would. The drug burns I’ve been victimized by have usually resulted in all kinds of random and stunningly violent acts of retribution. So this invisible economy generates all kinds of chaos, and so when you truly understand the relationship between lucre and those who hunger for it, it’s like the world gets turned inside out.
What am I talking about? Here’s an example: the Son of Sam killings in New York in the late 1970s were not so much about craziness as they were about a for-profit scheme to sell “snuff films” to the upper classes—that is, videos of them killing people were sold to people who wanted to see videos where people were killed. And around and around she goes.
Andrea: Bass riffing and guitar random arpeggios in search of unison in the chorus surrounded by multiplicated Eugene voices.
3. “Class”
Eugene: Cash, class, and the invisible ties that bind. Paul Fussell wrote a book about class called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System where he debunks this notion that America is a class-free community. It’s very much not, and insofar as it’s not it’s ripping America apart at the seams. It was once said that competition was the life blood of trade…so it invoked both competition and blood. Even then, and though it was written, at the nexus of all of our failings is this pervasive idea that some of us are worth more than the rest of us. By dint of birth, rights, or G-d. I look at it like a casus belli. And it’s a war that’s good to fight. On either side.
Andrea: Sometimes life itself calls for odd rhythms. Add downtuned unisons. Add more blues riffing. Change the scenario, then, as you start to feel comfortable, change it again.
4. “Movement Number 201”
Eugene: There’s a word that I use that sounds and means something totally different than when many others use it and that word is “humanist.” When I describe others—or myself—as such, it’s more in the spirit of the ways we’re much more like, and simultaneously worse, than the hogs that we share so much in common with. We’ve damaged each other and our claims at any sort of higher calling, daily. Regularly. Gleefully. Fleeing from this enduring truth is pointless at this point.
Andrea: Free improvisations have been an important part of Buñuel's shows lately. This example has been caught for the record.
5. “Bleat”
Eugene: Killers of humans have often talked about how their victims were pre-designated for them. Which was very much like the tango. If you’ve spent a lot of time dancing the tango like I have, it’s the pre-dance rituals where the genius work happens. There is the glance, the catch, the unspoken invitation, the spoken invitation, and finally the dance. It’s formal and formalized, and despite all of the following chaos, it’s ordered and ordered along the lines of most of the animal husbandry that made me want to call this after what it is: the sound sheep make. Or lambs. Or lambs of G-d.
And getting a guest on this? A perfect end to an imperfect life. But when you meet one of these people and they have yet to be killed? The prevailing sense is that they are lucky. Very, very lucky. Victims are seldom anything but.
Andrea: Solid noise-rock riffing, steady drumming, and a vocal feature from Jacob Bannon of Converge all make me a happy man.
6. “A Killing on the Beach”
Eugene: Albert Camus’s The Stranger makes this the go-to for The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” and beyond that me, with no interest in orthodoxies, but a great amount of interest in the liminal space between them, thinks through how and why I am rarely ever found without a gun on me, or between us. I’ve accepted it as writ, this fact that eventually I, who have been bound to others in the creation of life, would also be bound to some others in the destruction of aforementioned life. It is eventual. It is probable. What I hope for the most, however, is that it be…necessary.
Andrea: 6/4 is not a common time signature for rock, but it sure gets you in the mood building up to the chorus. Think of Mingus, think of The Beatles, think of Wire—then forget.
7. “Leather Bar”
Eugene: A friend of mine had been in a leather bar in Silverlake. While there, he spotted a rock celebrity who, while feeling caught out, blurted out that he was there “for the jukebox.” In other words he was at a leather bar not for the sense of community and clientele, but because he liked the records that existed there in the jukebox. This made me ineffably sad. Being able to make it through life without having to bullshit myself, or others, is both a lifelong goal and an achievement. My only hope is that others can make it, too. And you have my solemn word: if I’m ever spotted in a gay bar, know this: I’m there for the gay-bar shit.
Andrea: Krzysztof Penderecki's work was a great inspiration in the development of this track, graced by the featuring of Italian performer and composer Andrea Beninati on cello.
8. “High. Speed. Chase.”
Eugene: My friends, who were car thieves, had noted in an offhand moment that I should do a song like the ones that appeared on the soundtrack for the ultimate car theft movie: Gone in 60 Seconds. It’s not like they liked the movie all that much, but more that they were proud of all of the technology that they’d invented to aid and abet the stealing of cars and outracing the police after having done so. This one’s for you, my thieves.
Andrea: A straight noise-rock tune that sounds pure Buñuel, plus a bass solo.
9. “American Steel”
Eugene: Traveling the world and being a seeker of sunny places for shady people (not always of my choosing or instigation), there’s one thing that Americans do exceptionally well—and that’s power projection and the concerted acts of violence that go along with that. Moreover, if you haven’t known how dangerous any city or street is in America, please tell us how you’ve been able to so aggressively miss the obvious. Attempts have been made on my life no fewer than five times, with the first time being when I was five years old. When asked why I am the way that I am, I always point to my memoir to have that point made. I’m the animal American steel has made me. And many of you might be glad that it is so—that is, if you’re standing with, or behind, me. If you’re in front of me? G-d only knows. This is not force projection. This is a history lesson.
Andrea: Mid-tempo riffing in the Buñuel fashion of independent bass and guitar parts. Brace yourself for changes happening. Duane Denison of legendary band The Jesus Lizard shares the guitar chair with Xabier.
10. “Fixer”
Eugene: There used to be this Lower East Side–based deal called The Church of Realized Fantasies. It was presided over by this cat everyone used to call the Pope, and his slogan was that "the Pope smoked the dope the Pope smokes." He revolutionized weed delivery. And his acolytes used to get me whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. Too bad my only interests at the time happened to be cheap baked goods and orange juice. But that’s not who I’m writing about. I’m writing about the guys always affianced to criminal organizations that make everything go away. Everything bad. Unlike the movie portraitures of such like cats, I’ve found them to be aggrieved and stressed-out individuals. Like the pimps I’ve known. Despite the distance between movie-fake and street-real, though? There’s this song. With the estimable Megan O, no less. No relation to Jackie O. But I never think of one without thinking of the other.
Andrea: Megan Osztrosits of Couch Slut joins Eugene in this contrapunctual noise riff. New wave influences kick in.
11. “Trash”
Eugene: Once a week (and that’s a liberal estimate) I think about the New York Dolls. And I deeply and wholly unreasonably miss Johnny Thunders. If none of this makes sense to you, that’s not my fault.
Andrea: This track was born as a divertissement in the style of some ’80s band. Contemporary jazz saxophonist David Binney joined the track for a unique spin of Middle East melody and vocalizing—plus a killer solo, just because.
12. “Pimp”
Eugene: Ah, the aforementioned pimp. In literary terms we call that “foreshadowing,” and here we are again at the song of the same name. My last pimp friend described the job as being the worst kind of babysitting. He had to organize doctor’s visits, strong-arm tough guys who weren’t clear on how commerce worked, and then, and maybe most terribly, had to officiate fights between the women. His last day on the job? A bunch of hair had been cut off—by whom? Whose hair? Where was everyone?—and left on his pillow that had been stabbed with the scissors. That was the job. The reality of that job. Now remember what New York was like when all of those cats got airlifted out of Vietnam and dropped, hours later, right back on the streets of New York. It was dark. And so evil you could actually almost smell it. I smelled it again when I wrote this.
Andrea: Buñuel plays the blues.
13. “A Room in Berlin”
Eugene: This is a love song—very possibly the only one on the whole record. What’s more, it’s a love song wherein no love exists. We met in a graveyard for the German war dead. This was the same Germany where my aforementioned father had been a bass-playing spy for American intelligent interests during the Cold War. He played bass in a jazz trio but being multilingual (Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian, and sign language) he was there to watch and listen. That was his job. This is much less about him, though, and much more about whoever would think a romantic afternoon was walking amidst the tombstones of Nazis. The plan was much less planned-out than imagined. In the end, though, it was all bad. At least no one had to die. Which, when you talk about Germany, may be an accomplishment in and of itself.
Andrea: Buñuel's interest in sounds that can be described as “other” is already well-documented in different recordings of its members. Here, the bass becomes a church bell, the guitar becomes a never-ending glitch, and the drums a steel mill—all for setting up a soundtrack to Eugene's storytelling.
