Buttercup

by Jonathan Perry

For five people who were "never that serious about being a band," as songwriter Jim Buni puts it, Boston's Buttercup sure have a funny way of showing it. Just as advances of their second CD, Love, on the local label Spirit Orr were going out last November, the band were heading into the studio to record another album. Now, having finished the sessions for that as-yet-untitled release, Buni and his Buttercup colleagues -- bassist Colleen MacDonald, drummer Dan Lech, guitarist Mike Leahy, and pedal-steel player Tim Obetz -- are already at work on their fourth (!).

Still, says Buni, the band have considerable reservations about the music industry. "The people who play in this band do it because they like playing music. I think you really have to be a little crazy to join a rock band thinking that you're going to become a rock star."

Buttercup are loaded with folks who have spent the better part of their young adult lives forming and joining new bands out of old. Buni and Lech were in Pouch, an outfit that issued a couple of singles on Rockville Records. MacDonald, Lech, and Buni played together in Nobody Home. And Leahy, who came aboard the good ship Buttercup after the departure of original member Hugh O'Donovan, played with both the Blake Babies and Dumptruck.

Buttercup started generating a buzz after cassettes of the group's 1994 15-song demo project made it into the hands of Spirit of Orr, who offered to put it out on CD. So, two years after it was recorded, Gold -- a compulsively listenable compendium of transistor-radio pop daydreams -- was quietly released, only to receive notice in publications like CMJ and Alternative Press. Love finds the band moving toward a rootsier Jayhawks-meets-dB's vibe. And though an undercurrent of melancholy courses through most of Buni's songs, there's also a lightness to the vocal harmonies, a looser give-and-take that suggests things might not turn out so badly after all.