Buffalo Tom returns to the roots of College Rock with ‘Jump Rope’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Six years after their last album, Boston’s Buffalo Tom returns to the same sound that made them one of the most underrated college rock bands of the 1990s with Jumping rope, their tenth album. The music here will be familiar to anyone who grew up with “Sodajerk” or “Birdbrain.”

In fact, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the album’s opening track, the ringing “Helmet,” was released years ago. As frontman Bill Janovitz recently said: “As with most things in Buffalo Tom, we have a chemistry and a natural sound that emerges no matter how we try to manipulate it. “Helmet” is a great example of this phenomenon, a song that could fit on any of our previous records, but I primarily associate it with the clean, layered sounds of Big Red Letter Day.”

The band – still comprised of the three founding members – singer/guitarist Janovitz, bassist Chris Colbourn and drummer Tom Maginnis – approaches this record with the same relaxed, effortless vibe that has made the trio such a formidable band throughout. The harmonies of “New Girl Singing” and the cool, effortless vocals of “Recipes” and “Come Closer” sound like a group that has spent decades working together and anticipating what’s next.

Coming from the same Amherst/Boston music scene that birthed a brilliantly diverse collective of bands like the Blake Babies/Juliana Hatfield, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr, the Pixies, the Lemonheads and Morphine, Buffalo Tom had (and still has ) a sound that while it owes a genealogy to both pop and punk and even sometimes folk and roots, it is still best described by the Gen X catch-all term, Alternative Rock. You can hear this in songs like “Come Closer” and “Little Ghostmaker,” which are hard to define. There’s not a lot of new music here, but there’s no need to be.

The band is celebrating the album’s release with a series of frustrating shows across the United States that begin Friday locally in Amherst before heading to a handful of dates in Europe.