Whether Abe Vigoda are named after the Godfather actor I am not going to assume. What we do know is Abe Vigoda are LA’s myriad favourite, a complex agenda they are but quintessentially compelling at intervals. An entrapment of tropical punk, new wave, raggaeton and pop their music that hits you like a whiplash. They are reminiscent of bands like Animal Collective and Lemonade purely for their relentless onslaught of prolonged jams melting into songs.
They take New Wave jam-style sound from Battles to songs like ‘Bear Face’ and ‘Dead City Waste Wilderness’ with pinches of pop. The former sounds like an underground take on a Vampire Weekend mix, with muddled musicianship. However, it remits like a carnival with a raggaeton beat at the forefront of this savvy pop curve ball. The latter rekindles the boisterous beat with Vidal’s unyielding chanting.
Next on the record is a short interlude called ‘Lantern Lights’ that starts with a subsonic blast of guitar distortion before an impromptu end. ‘Animal Ghosts’ is full of distortion, calamity drumming and the scant ability to differentiate what lyrical content exists within the music, Vidal sounds like a muffled Tim Harrington (Les Savy Fav). Its like finding a needle in a hay stack with the LA quartet. The twisted tropical-punk piece ‘Cranes’ changes directions quicker than you can blink, it shudders with flavors from all genres and reaffirms that there really isn’t any boundaries with Abe Vigoda’s music.
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‘Visi Rings’ collages an abundance of new wave, foxed-out uprising boasting’s of guitar mutation on a canvas of speaker splitting beats. ‘Skeleton’ reflects a punk clamor that extorts their sound with one last mash-up on the album, a breathless onslaught upon your now aching ear.
It’s hard to differentiate whether this is a twisted masterpiece or a colossal pile of racket at first. It is music for discerning tastes that’s for sure but maybe not in one place at the same time. A molten commotion from these noise making LA students honing their experimental freedom-seeking values. Not for the people who have attention problems. The more I listened to it, the more I started to hate it! It wears you down like a bad relationship.
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