First things first: I don't know if Buva is a first name, a last name, a stage name, or the name of this dude's pet cow. It doesn't really matter when the music is this good.
Buva, a multi-instrumentalist who plays most of the music on Daydream, is a modern rock alchemist in the Matthew Sweet/Beck mold. You could call it low-fi alterna-pop, I suppose. What I mostly hear, though, is crunchy guitars, subtle, shimmering loops and textures, layered harmony vocals on the choruses, and song after song arranged and produced with Brian Wilson-like care.
The crunchy guitars are most evident on leadoff track "Be Good To Yourself," which has an upbeat, effervescent Ben Kweller feel. Even on this fairly straight-ahead track, though, you'll notice interesting textures and miscellaneous odd noises lurking in the background. The sonic variety quotient grows again with "Another World," which throws enough musical twists, turns and production flourishes into the pot to draw the inevitable Sgt. Pepper's comparison.
Ironically enough, the dreamiest song here is probably neither the titular "Daydream" nor the closing, somewhat Ben Folds-ish piano ballad "I Fall Asleep," but rather "She Gets Around," whose subtle textures and strings swim in circles behind Buva's dreamy lead vocals. By contrast, "Daydream" comes off like one of Folds' geek revenge fantasies: "Jerk-offs one and all / They're the ones who should be on the wall / They're the ones who didn't bring a ball to the game / Your friends are so lame / Please forgive me if I'm not the same." Granted, the chorus is pretty dreamy with its languorous guitar licks, but the lyrics provide quite the sharp-edged contrast.
Each of these five densely populated tracks presents a potent mixture of offhanded casualness and calculated sweep that immediately suggests the adjective "cinematic." It's no surprise, then, to find out that over the past eighteen months Buva has placed a number of these and other songs with movie soundtracks and TV series ( Stuck On You, The OC, Tru Calling, One Tree Hill, Wonderfalls, etc.). It fits.
I wish I could tell you more about the Buvonic One, but his disc arrived with no press kit and his Web site is decidedly short on biographical details. Satisfy your own curiosity and/or purchase this terrific little disc at his website. Meanwhile, I'm going back in for another listen to see what else I can catch…