The self-produced, sophomore album from Milwaukee, WI-based artist Buffalo Nichols is an ear-opening mix of reimagined blues and folk songs as The Fatalist captures the current confusing zeitgeist while bleakly looking into the unknown future on one of the most affecting releases of 2023.
Nothing is straight ahead here. While it is the blues, it is also the gray area in all of life as Nichols states he has seen too much “bad behavior in the canon of good men”. The gruff vocals, slide guitar, tambourine, and literal thunder rolls, all color the capitalist blues of the stark “Cold Black Stare”. This sense of isolation, desperation, and anger from a personal standpoint percolates throughout the album, at times bursting forth or simmering under the surface.
A track like the acoustic-based “The Difference” is a muddled, break-up track with Dylanesque kiss-off vibes, while his fingerpicking is dexterous on “Love Is All”, a tune that seems to question society but finds solace in love when it is available. The wandering “Turn Another Stone” musically rolls out like a sweet hoe-down, but Nichols’s tales of searching for a home in these cities and locales is downright harrowing, and when paired with the upbeat strums, feel surreal.
That sense of shifting reality is best experienced in Nichol’s most adventurous (and best) offerings, including his reworking of Blind Willie Johnson’s “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond”. For the song Nichols injects 808 beats and samples from Charley Patton that swirl around, all the while delivering guitar and vocal goods. This experimental style continues for both the haunting “The Long Journey Home” and the desperate title track as each uses fiddle/banjo/guitar, deep beats, and synths that hypnotize around Nichols’s commanding vocals, as both tracks recall Leonard Cohen at his most effective.
The anti-war song “This Moment” brings on Samantha Rise for a powerful duet that wraps up an extremely effective album that drops the blues directly into 2023 with all the baggage, updates, and stylization that entails. Nichols sings about troubles as he sees, using sounds he loves in unique ways, carving his own unique path with this release.
While Buffalo Nichols’ debut was a warm and welcoming affair, this follow-up is anything but, and it is also a huge stride artistically forward for Nichols. The Fatalist gains in stature with each spin and when each dark night falls, as Nichols displays his affinity for electro beats and goth-like sounds that color his dramatic wordplay and deep reverence for a genre he loves and shoulders into the future.
