Who or what is Nick Buzz? Comprised of exceptionally talented musical eccentrics, Nick Buzz has built a cult following with their dark artistic vision and avant-garde cabaret music. The band name references the fleeting euphoria of a nicotine fix, and the shimmering orchestral music creates a similarly reverberating rush.

A Quiet Evening At Home opens with the agri-stentialist home truth of “The Hens Lay Everyday,” set against uneasy electronic punctuation. The song reminds us of a now quaint vision of the future – you’ll wonder what happened to all those robots we were promised. The LCD Soundsystem-esque spoken-word oddity tilts the album title disconcertingly – home may be a place of creatures rather than comforts.

Nick Buzz does delicate beauty as deftly as they do the noir and sinister. Songs like “This Is Not My World,” and “If You Go Away” (recorded live at Glenn Gould Studio), are sparse, theatric and gracefully forlorn. The record also includes “The House With The Laughing Windows,” originally found on the four-part Martin Tielli subscription series.

A Quiet Evening At Home has everything from off-kilter staccatos, swirling nightmarish layers of flickering beeps and dizzying sweeps of orchestral strings, peculiar lyrics and moments of pure blissful melody and poetry. The album is dissonant and challenging, but also incredible precise, subtle and striking.

Six Shooter Records released A Quiet Evening At Home on August 20, 2013.