(((SIGNALS))) Buzzard – Hillbilly Fuckery b/w Appalachian Blood Bourbon
A signal comes before the full transmission. (((SIGNALS))) is Doomnation Radio’s space for bands to tell us about their new single and what it points toward: why it stands on its own, where it sits in the world they are building, and what that world holds. Three questions only, the rest is up to them.
Band: Buzzard
Single: Hillbilly Fuckery b/w Appalachian Blood Bourbon
Release: Self-released (digital)
Release Date: July 10, 2026
Christopher Thomas Elliott records Buzzard by himself in Massachusetts, running banjo and lap steel through fuzz and dropped-tuning riffs. The new single pairs Hillbilly Fuckery, built from an International WTF Tabernacle Choir of more than fifty voices sending in recordings of themselves, with Appalachian Blood Bourbon, a tale of backwoods vampires who climb from the hollers into billionaire bunkers. He answered our three questions from inside the world he calls Buzzard.
(1) Why release these two songs together on one single?
First off: both songs feature banjo and fuzz. The first song I wrote for Buzzard was the song “Buzzard,” where I first embraced Sabbathian riffs and banjo. These songs represent further experimentation with combining banjo as well as lap steel with filthy dropped-tuned riffery.
Furthermore, both songs depict human debauchery and civilizational decline. Both songs joke about stereotypes of rural America while punching up at the powers-up-that-be. Both songs deal with deranged dumbasses gaining power. Is not Stephen Miller the ultimate 21st Century ghoul? Couldn’t RFK and the Crypt Keeper hangout out sharing medical advice?
I grew up among upstate New York hillbillies on my school bus and in my family. I’m part hillbilly myself; I’m a weird mix of identity detritus high and low. In the song HF I connect the juvenile fuckery I committed as a teenager to the official fuckery I resist as an adult. A similar MAGA mentality runs from 80s Binghamton to the White House. MAGA didn’t come from nowhere; it came from little pockets everywhere. In ABB I imagine a cast of rural characters as vampires building a business empire. In both songs I play with stereotypes of hicks and rednecks. These qualities encompass where I come from as well as what I reject. But I recognize myself in some of the characters. Part of me likes Beavis, Hunter, and those rascally redneck ghouls. I hasten to add that I’m also just having tons of fun with the wordplay and storytelling. Both songs are scathing but comedic and jaunty in their way. I grinned spontaneously while singing them. That spirit ties them together.
(2) Where do Hillbilly Fuckery and Appalachian Blood Bourbon sit in the world you have been building as Buzzard?
The Buzzard world consists of the 3-legged stool of Americana, Doom, and Horror, which led to my initial elevator pitch “What if Dylan listened to Sabbath and read Lovecraft?” These two songs lean heavily on the Dylan leg of the stool, which brings folk storytelling, bluegrass, social commentary, talky vocals, scorn, and humor. The Sabbath leg brings some fuzzy guitar and stank face groove. The Lovecraft leg doesn’t come into play much, since the vampires are more folk horror than cosmic horror, not to mention being satiric as well. With HF I’m both delving back to my coffeehouse days by telling tall tales about misspent youth while pushing forward with the heavy political spleen of Everything Is Not Going To Be Alright. With ABB I’m making a point to elaborate on the storytelling tradition established on Doom Folk. I use Buzzard to vent, but I also don’t want the music to be all polemics. I also want Buzzard to spin good yarns. The songs should be populated with memorable characters, bizarre notions, and vivid imagery.
The next LP this fall Hush Now is pretty balanced between the Doom and Folk legs, adding a touch of the Weird, while next year’s LP Cosmic Conspiracy leans hard into Lovecraft with space monsters, post-human aliens, evil deities, and zero banjo. This shifting of focus on the three legs happens organically as ideas come to me, the world offers its malign inspiration, and my curiosity wanders.
(3) If this single were a scene in a movie, what happens in it?
I would love to turn ABB into a graphic novel, comic book, or film. A kind of horror comedy with a sharp satirical edge. Like the first few verses of the song, the pilot episode would establish the cast of characters: a fallen aristocratic family emigrates from the Old World to America to build a new life. It’s the American Dream! Except, starring deranged vampires. Settling into Kentucky backwoods, the degen vampires set up their copper kettle in a crypt and start distilling their possum blood formula. The drunk undead Floyd and Fred experiment with their horse blood bathtub gin. Zombie mothers feed baby ghouls bottles of blood booze. Count Cleetus wearing a coonskin cap and a coyote skin drains the blood of cops outside the donut shop. This is all there in the song. Then they move to Cleveland to build an underground business empire. Again, it’s the American Dream! These vampires are really the pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps types.
In the big city, instead of squirrels, the oppressed unhoused and exploited sex workers supply blood for the increasingly top-shelf brand of bourbon. The hillbilly vampires become shadowy billionaires in a subterranean ring of in-bred one-percenters. This decadent cabal of ladies and lords secretly run the world. A vampiric equivalent of Jeffrey Epstein supplies underage virgin blood to the heinous degens lurking in luxury underground bunkers. The bloodsucking bosses sleep in coffins made of gold. In my song, there are no heroes: it’s bloodsuckers and the bloodsucked all the way down. So in the movie, we’ll need vampire slayers that fit the mythology. Perhaps, a ragtag militia of stoners? Benevolent vegan werewolves? Anti-oligarchy demons (because Satan is a rebel with a cause who defends the downtrodden and the Christian God is a tyrant who backs the oligarchs.) It would probably be more interesting if the good guys were not human, but a different breed of monster or alien. I hadn’t really started stretching the story outside the song until you asked the question! That’s where it would be great to have a co-writer and visual artist to build out a saga. And sure, HF could be a movie too, but probably it would just me alone in a room yelling “What the fuck?” about random things. The camera slowly zooms out for 90 minutes. Like an experimental art film by Stan Brakhage.
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