Local song

Buffalo Tom, "Rachel"

Pretty on the outside

For the first nine of its 180 seconds, the thoughtful, glistening notes that open "Rachael," the first single from Buffalo Tom's sixth album, Smitten (PGD/Polydor), sounded pretty much like what we'd come to expect from a Buffalo Tom song: crystalline pretty, but shaded with a tinge of threat and melancholy that hinted at something darker. In second number 10, however, something happened that's never happened before in the band's 10-year recording career. Instead of the rugged, bracing plea of guitarist Bill Janovitz's voice, which had stamped -- and rendered instantly familiar -- every one of the band's singles dating back to 1989, we got bassist Chris Colbourn's chaste tenor asking whether the uniformed schoolgirl in question was "really just a penny whore" who's "picked up all these crazy men." Full of delicate drama that crested into that crashing, power-chord urgency that we know so well, "Rachael" was a strong contender for Best Local Song from the moment it blasted across the airwaves last autumn -- even in its neutered, expletive-deleted form serviced to radio (they did, after all, say "whore"). Inspired in part by Giulietta Masina's portrayal of a prostitute in Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, Colbourn's starch-crisp vocal stood in contrast to the song's tawdry subject matter, and it was just about perfect.

-- Jonathan Perry

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