Buck O Nine – Twenty-Eight Teeth – Review

Buck O Nine

Twenty-Eight Teeth (TVT)
by Margo Tiffen

Ever get frustrated with your life? You know, all the hot chicks keep blowing you off and that jerk at the 7-Eleven just cut up your fake ID… Maybe you should start a band. That new Bosstones song is pretty cool and the Suicide Machines sure look like they get lots of chicks. You can’t play guitar all that well, but what the hell. Now if you could just convince some of those marching band guys who play those horn things to join your new ska/punk band, you’d kick ass! Well, don’t bother, because Buck-O-Nine already beat you to it. A completely non-innovative ska/punk band, Buck-O-Nine fits nicely into that category called “filler bands.” You take a really great pioneering band like Operation Ivy, now they had something important to say… in short, it was beautiful. Then you give it enough time for the mainstream to really catch on… say, about eight to ten years or so.

You need a bit of mass exposure first. Some people are really slow, or at least that’s the impression that I get. Every small town loser in America looking for an easy ride instead of actually having to create original music that means something and comes from their heart will kill the genre with an overload of cheap, soulless imitations. Of course, Buck-O-Nine already have five years under their belt and although that may give them a jump in the credibility category, five years means nothing if you still suck. The singer’s whiny and nasal, and the songs on their new album,Twenty-Eight Teeth, pretty much all sound the same. The music’s simple and at times becomes outright annoying. The lyrics are just stupid and read like a fourteen-year-old skater’s bad poetry. In the bio, there’s a quote from guitarist Jonas Kleiner, “…we don’t want to play trivial music that lacks substance and integrity.” I don’t want you to, either.