Ambitious and dramatic, Grant Lee Buffalo's music veers from visionary roots rock to U2-style emotional grandeur at a time when most bands seem reluctant to risk anything nearly so bold. As a songwriter and guitarist, Grant Lee Phillips revels in melody and rich, enveloping textures that stand in stark contrast to so much monochromatic rock. Best of all, he is an extraordinary singer whose voice...

You would be hard pressed to come up with a moniker that is more American – albeit unwieldy – than Grant Lee Buffalo, which invokes the names of the North's and the South's Civil War generals and a time when the West was still wild. In its breadth, drama and mythical evocation of America, Mighty Joe Moon, the band's second album, recalls Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, The Band and...

Grant Lee Buffalo have always seemed like a cross between early '70s Roxy Music and early '80s R.E.M., combining campy, multilayered collages full of pop-culture imagery with dense, moody atmospherics and irresistible, jangly guitar hooks. Although songs such as the title track from 1992's Fuzzy and "Mockingbirds" from 1994's Mighty Joe Moon showed promise, the Los Angeles trio's self-consciously...