Plumbiferous Media

Long Beach alt-rock group Avi Buf­falo was founded by then-high school stu­dent Avig­dor Zahner-Isenberg (whose nick­name, Avi, became the source of the band’s name). Zahner-Isenberg met the rest of his band and started out, like so many other groups, by post­ing songs on Myspace. After Avi Buf­falo was noticed by Sub Pop, the band put together their debut album and on Tues­day released that self-titled intro­duc­tion. Avi Buf­falo demon­strates some def­i­nite poten­tial on the part of the band - a hun­dred dif­fer­ent influ­ences mixed with some real cre­ativ­ity makes for an inter­est­ing debut, though the album cer­tainly has flaws.

Front­man Zahner-Isenberg’s vocals, armed with a keen­ing edge, imme­di­ately dis­tin­guish Avi Buffalo’s music, simul­ta­ne­ously giv­ing it an emo­tional edge and (in his sharper moments) pro­vid­ing a clear con­trast to the softer instru­men­tals. Zahner-Isenburg tells the occa­sion­ally odd tales that pop­u­late Avi Buf­falo with a del­i­cate but deep tone that he inter­rupts for the more ener­getic cho­ruses of songs like “What’s in it for?.” When he’s accom­pa­nied by key­boardist Rebecca Cole­man, the vocals take on a fur­ther depth as their voices nicely com­ple­ment each other as well as the instru­men­tals. Unfor­tu­nately, from time to time, both slip into shrill­ness, which, though irri­tat­ing, is for­tu­nately at least some­what intermittent.

But shrill­ness aside, Zahner-Isenburg (and occa­sion­ally Cole­man) do a good job of nar­rat­ing Avi Buf­falo’s sto­ries. A few are con­ver­sa­tions (if one-sided): “Jes­sica / Why do you always make it so hard? / You know I’m kid­ding / But some­times I feel like you’re all I’ve got,” while oth­ers are the rem­i­nis­cences that one might expect from a band like Avi Buf­falo, with the slight odd­ness that the band’s lyrics seem to cul­ti­vate. In one exam­ple, Zahner-Isenburg sings of “strips of weari­ness in my rav­ing heart,” which, along with his descrip­tion of a pair of lips as “lit­tle strips of bacon” does a sur­pris­ingly good job at describ­ing exactly what he’s try­ing to get across, how­ever odd it may seem at first glance.

Avi Buf­falo is cer­tainly capa­ble of adding solid instru­men­tal parts to its tracks. The album’s open­ing track is, for a decent while, purely instru­men­tal, and it cer­tainly devel­ops well. The warmth of the record­ing, espe­cially notice­able in the bass, also bodes well for Avi Buf­falo, although, as it turns out, the warmth is lim­ited almost entirely to the instru­men­tals, often leav­ing the vocals shrill. There are, of course, other instru­men­tal sec­tions on the album, and most of them are quite strong, most notice­ably, the drum-heavy end of “Can’t I Know.”

Still, even with a num­ber of strong sec­tions for instru­men­tals, there is a fair share of dull rep­e­ti­tion. Some tracks start strong then fail to main­tain any sort of devel­op­ment or pro­gres­sion, and oth­ers are just not all that great. A larger prob­lem seems to be a dis­con­nect between the instru­men­tals and every­thing else. If it exists, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to find any log­i­cal cor­re­la­tion between what is being played and what is being sung, other than just try­ing to sound good while let­ting the singers tell their sto­ries, which really isn’t much of a con­nec­tion. In fact, the instru­men­tals will, on occa­sion, seem to go as far as to con­tra­dict the lyrics. While this may have been specif­i­cally planned, it’s hard to under­stand why “What’s in it for” speeds up after the line: “stretch­ing things out so long.”

Avi Buf­falo is not an amaz­ing album. The sound is gen­er­ally well devel­oped, and main­tains a very solid level of den­sity, nei­ther to sparsely pop­u­lated nor clut­tered, but Avi Buf­falo is by no means devoid of sig­nif­i­cant dull areas through­out the album. Still, while this is by no means a top album, it’s a pretty solid debut album. The band mem­bers may not be in tune with one another (from a the­matic, not tonal per­spec­tive), but that’s still excus­able as inex­pe­ri­ence with one another, at least in the set­ting of record­ing an album. All in all, Avi Buf­falo is, more or less, a decent album.

This post is tagged 60-69, Avi Buffalo