Buck Gooter – “Sex with a Hornet’s Nest” (2014)

You know, sometimes all I need to see in order to check out a band is a rad name. Don Cab had some weird, overly verbose titles. Carcass had their coroner cosplay titles. And Buck Gooter has this. Instant listen. No second thoughts. No hesitation. I don’t care if they sound like Voxtrot mixed with Sublime. It could be somehow worse than that combo and I’m still listening to it at least once. Thankfully, Buck Gooter is rad across the board.

The unlikely duo of younger noise rocker dude Billy Brett and older outsider artist dude Terry Turtle formed in 2005 after Brett applied for a job at The Little Grill in Harrisonburg, Virginia where Turtle was working at the time. The restaurant was filled with Turtle’s art, and Brett struck up a friendship after finding out Turtle was responsible for the work. Soon after, the two began making music together, and really haven’t stopped since. Seriously, they’ve released at least fifteen albums since 2005, with even more EPs and splits in their catalogue. They got their name when Turtle told Brett “Fuck You!” with a mouthful of pancakes, and it came out like Buck Gooter. That’s a fucking name right there. Don’t buy it? Well, please indulge me for one moment.

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Buck. Gooter.

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Right? Hell yeah. Really rattles the marrow. That’s the good stuff.

Also, their Bandcamp page describes them as “PRIMAL INDUSTRIAL BLUES. TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME”. Like I said, rad across the board.

“Sex with a Hornet’s Nest” is off of their 2014 album The Spider’s Eyes, and I would say that it met my lofty expectations. Loud, screeching noise rock. A crazed old man howling at you. A very literal song about sacking the fuck up and fucking a hornet’s nest. These are the good things that Buck Gooter has provided us. This is one of the best songs of the past decade if only for the line “Sex with a hornet’s nest/ You’ll probably die, but you’re tougher than the rest”. You know, there are plenty of songs about doing tough guy shit, but there are is a criminally smaller percentage of songs about doing tough guy shit that is also bugfuck crazy. For this, I heartly salute Buck Gooter. It is a cacophonous, angry, demented song that I admire greatly, which is made even better by the music video. The video is just handheld footage of Turtle murmuring the lyrics out of time with the track by a river bank as he wears a hornet’s nest as a hat. I keep belaboring this point, but it bears repeating: rad across the board. Check this thing out, yo.

For more short song discussions, check out our post about the song “Manchasm” by Future of the Left here.