Abe Vigoda–Skeleton
If you’re going to name a band after a celebrity, you couldn’t do any better than Abe Vigoda. After all, it was Barzini all along. AV has generated a goodish amount of buzz with the releast of “Skeleton,” their second release, and touring with fellow Los Angelenoids No Age has raised their profile even further. It was hearing about their live show–hearing that it blew No Age off the Stage–that led me to check out the album. My judgment, in the end, is that I wish I’d seen them live. Not that the album is bad. It’s certainly not: it packs a consistently hard punch from track one to track fourteen. Led by furious drums and layered, ringing guitars, every song is a swirling soup of sound. It is, though, a little too consistent for my tastes. It’s not hard to catch on to the tricks here, and though I really like both the ideas and the execution, it’s a little bit one-trickish. I’m also not wild about the muted production which keeps the drums and guitars from popping out of the speakers and leaves the vocals consistently low in the mix. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be impressed, and some people willgo wild for this. If you like the idea of hearing Man Man meet Animal Collective, you might be one of them.