Five Years of Fireworks comes with two discs: one a compilation of Grand Buffet recordings and the other a DVD with a handful of videos; I opted for the DVD first. The videos are endearingly lo-fi and mostly shot in the haunts of middle-class east coast white geeks: Seven-Elevens, malls, and backyards.
(I should know.) They reveal Grand Buffet as a pair, one an energetic skinny kid who does most of the rapping while sporting an Abraham Lincoln beard and the other a big fella who does the Silent Bob in the background. They have a real love for the convenience store diet.
They come across as quite likable and the DVD dispels any notion that they are a manufactured phenomenon: there is no, no, NO machinery behind Grand Buffet. This is about as DIY as you can get. Their predominant attitude is a sort of deadpan, self-conscious, above-it-all jokiness familiar to anyone who survived junior high. They’re juvenile, but this type of thing (rapping, playing gigs, being a struggling artist) also takes guts. I want to like them.
As for the music, it’s a hardcore punk/hip-hop hybrid, with clever, rapid-fire rapping backed most often by fuzzed-out, Frankenstein style organ chords. Comparisons with The Beastie Boys are inevitable, and Grand Buffet is as childish though not as dumb as License to Ill-era Beasties.
Their sound ignores the middle section of the Beastie career and mixes in pre-success, punk Beasties with Hello Nasty-era crunched electronics. Their production is beyond cheap, and although they do occasionally manage to overcome it on a track like “Candy Bars,” which sticks in your head forever, it mostly trips them up.
Grand Buffet’s stuff doesn’t really benefit from lo-fi. They need to be amped up and layered. Maybe, just maybe, if they scraped together the cash to record “Candy Bars” more professionally, they could use it to break through. But Five Years of Fireworks ends up sounding like exactly what it is: a collection of demos from a somewhat talented band that may have already hit their ceiling playing gigs at all-ages clubs along the Northeast corridor.
They’re a band you’ve seen a million times – good enough to keep going after high school, and to be studs on the local scene, but nothing more.
– Thomas Vale
Grand Buffet (Fighting Records)