It’s a rarer and rarer experience in popular music to find a band that sounds at once emotionally inspired and familiar in a way that feels like home. That Atlanta’s Goodnight Buffalo embodies both of these traits comes through as certain even seconds into any of their songs. Anthemic while also earnest, intimate in a way that fills a room, it seems clear that here’s a band designed to spread its sound over the world. These aspirations aren’t surprising given any familiarity with the bands’ past. Formed in Atlanta, Georgia by two brothers sharing bands and a love of music since childhood, vocalist/lyricist Brian Kahl and songwriter/guitars/keys Rusty Kahl provide a backbone of steady, intent vision. The steady bass lines of Clint Kahl and driving rhythm of drummer Tom Bruno establish a wise and textured momentum that knows when to ride and when to build. Guitarist Dan Edwards’s melodic, tasteful leads complete the picture of a sound with the largesse of a Coldplay or U2 cut with the warmth of Pearl Jam or Ryan Adams, all boiled down into a lean, organic orchestration bearing a mark of the band’s own. Having just completed their first full length album and already receiving mainstream airplay on the soundtracks of shows like MTV’s Jersey Shore, not to mention a regularly rising audience in their hometown and abroad, it’s pretty easy to recognize the future of Goodnight Buffalo as one that’s aimed at something wide and bright. Sincerity and will are one thing in pop music, but it’s the rarer sound that treads the nameless place between reminiscence and growing up. Goodnight Buffalo walks that line shrewdly, confidently, in a way you’re not meant to forget. -Blake Butler Author “Scorch Atlas,” “There is No Year” & “Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia”