I only knew one song from Avi Buffalo, the very catchy, poppy and Shins-esque ‘What’s in it for’ (the one where he sings about the lips being like little pieces of bacon) and of course they sang it during their set at the FYF fest, right at the beginning of the afternoon
Wearing a yellow Tweety sweat-shirt, Avi Zahner-Isenberg looked like a very young boy, but this did not stop him from playing with an extreme confidence, asking the crowd if the bass, the guitar was ok, declaring ‘We got a big band today!’ They were indeed something like 8 on stage, with keyboard, percussion and even a clarinet or a saxo on certain songs.
There were a lot of guitars, even some jazz-influenced guitars, and lots of layered arrangements with keyboard and rhythm section, most of the tunes being not as catchy as the one I knew, but taking surprising developments.
With his weird plaintive falsetto voice, he sang as if he was about to burst out laughing at any moment, announcing the songs, ‘Jessica’, ‘Five Little Sluts’, ‘Remember last time’, but Avi’s voice strangely metamorphosed into a lower baritone when they played new songs. And during these new songs, a surprise guest wearing a Darth Vader helmet added a few rap verses, something I did not expect at all coming from the Long Beach poppy band. But the crowd was happy, these people were braving the 1:30pm-hot sun to see them and there were a lot of them.
Avi ended up the set, wearing a sombrero, looking again assured and speaking fast as if he has had a lot of one of the festival sponsors, Red Bull,… hey, I am not even sure he has reached the legal drinking age.