Days follow each other and they do and don’t resemble each other. I went two nights in a row at Amoeba to see Karen O then Avi buffalo and if the crowd was obviously thinner the second day (Wednesday), the quartet delivered a great show, and this time, I was front row!!
I have seen Avi (real name Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg) a few times before and I have always been impressed by his melodic and fuzzy guitar and high-pitched voice, yeah he often takes that sort of Neil Young falsetto these days, driving the songs through weird and sex-charged lyrics?? During ‘Memories of You’, he sings, ‘My bones are press/ Up to your chest’,… bones are, bones’re? But, as the Pitchfork’s reviewer noticed it, you can easily hear something else? Actually the whole song is as hot as teenagers’ sexual desire,… ‘You’ve got magnum desire/I’m a cheese ball on fire’… ‘My cherry pie, please take my load’, is that too many sex-food for you? Well you should remember about these ‘lips like pieces of bacon’ in the delicious and Shins-esque blissfull piece of pop that ‘What’s In it For?’ was a few years ago.
Avi Buffalo, the band from Long Beach, was playing at Amoeba to promote the release of their second album, ‘At Best Cuckold’ (what did I say?) the follow-up to their 2010 self-titled. If Avi Buffalo and the songs are all about Avi’s mind and world, Avi Buffalo the band is a quartet with Sheridan Riley on drums and vocal harmonies, Doug Brown on bass, and Anthony Vezirian, who seemed to have a really great time on keyboard.
Avi is a young guy but he has now reached the drinking age (he is 23 but was only 19 when he wrote his fist album) and the music has taken many interesting directions with fast-driven guitars, emotional ballads, plenty of hooks sung with a large range of falsettos and beyond, detailed guitar play and harmonies. At Amoeba, he seemed so focused, concentrated on his songs and his guitar virtuosity – he had these great moments of grandeur with guitar solos breaking the place into many pieces, or absorbed by sweet melodies, giving us a rare but large smile…There was a bit of this Neil Young-esque vibe during ‘Won’t Be Around no More’, which was pleasantly mixing sweetness with fuzziness, but the songs were not always what they appeared to be, as the gentle balladery of ‘Oxygen Tank’ ended up into an sophisticated, elaborated keyboard-guitar piece, juiced up like some Al Di Meola jazzy solo, and going from order to chaos.
Oh sure, Avi Buffalo could just be another indie band, and may be they are, but I thought there was something almost Beatles-que in some of these songs, a bit of McCartney here and some Harrison-esque guitars there (‘Overwhelmed with Pride’, ‘She is Seventeen’) blended with weird lyrics and enough darkness (‘Couple nights ago, I ran over two dogs. Then I ate them afterwards’) to make Avi’s music totally special.
More pictures of the show here.
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