Send "Abe Vigoda " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 If you dug Abe Vigoda's last album, Skeleton, but slept on the follow-up EP Reviver, Crush might come as a bit of a shock. Where Skeleton solidified their rep as "tropical-punk" workaholics, spitting out blasts of chiming guitar and gnarled beats, Crush indulges their love of goth and coldwave, with synths often louder than guitars. Reviver nudged things in that direction, sounding more emotive and less claustrophobic (there was even a maudlin remake of Skeleton's "Endless Sleeper" that did away drums entirely), but here they go full-bore, evoking the drama of Psychedelic Furs or Echo and the Bunnymen.It was a big risk to take, and it's paid off: The songs may sound more conventional, but they're no less complex. Its tracks are hard-wired and overflowing with activity, even in the record's sparsest moments. For me, Abe Vigoda's trademark is tightly-wound songs that spill into chaos, and that's here in spades-- the heightened accessibility never comes at a compromise. Being into Abe Vigoda still means being an adrenaline-junkie, and much of Crush is as frenetic and engagingly exhausting as anything on Skeleton. Where the latter slammed quickly into that frenzy, Crush takes more time to crest into its darker waves. Early tracks are marked more by Dane Chadwick's sharp drumming and Michael Vidal's smoldering voice (recalling Richard Butler and Peter Murphy) than any of the sounds in between. But midway through, Crush really flames up. "November", "Pure Violence", and the title track all weave spiraling structures that constantly ride curves and turn corners. It's easy to hear echoes of Skeleton in the cascading guitars, but the increased prominence of Vidal's singing gives it all an aching, moody edge, as if the band's tropical locale has become shrouded in sun-blocking clouds....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| As 80s nostalgia has melted into 90s nostalgia with the concluding aughts, some parts of pop music (especially indie pop) have perhaps unsurprisingly slid what’s retro forward, dwelling no longer on the 60s and 70s (revisited psychedelia, disco), but on the 80s, an era that now concluded nearly 20 years ago. Granted, there’ve always been synthesizers. In some circles, the indispensability of the artificial, of the 4/4 dance beat, was never called into question — night clubs and dance pop have always needed the non-acoustic to survive. But even as theme-party attendees have abandoned their sweatbands and side-ponytails for flannel and combat boots, the center-of-the-road alt-pop band has looked to those fads’ temporal predecessors for inspiration. (See: Yeasayer’s Odd Blood, Bear In Heaven’s Beast Rest Forth Mouth, M83’s Saturdays=Youth, etc.) Enter Abe Vigoda, a Los Angeles quartet up to this point declared by itself and others a “tropical punk” band (and one possessed of perhaps my favorite ridiculous name). But I’m not sure the description holds water anymore, as the Crush-era Abe Vigoda barely resembles its previous incarnations, ones primarily concerned with the quick punk song, terse and terrorizing even as it was bright and melodic. See, Skeleton, their 2008 breakthrough LP, was a frantic, semi-violent exploration of ecstatic celebratory soundscape, the type of on-speed, deliberately-out-of-tune album you put on a pineapple hat for. It was riddled with cowbell, echoing vocals, and song parts that followed, maniacally, one after the other, quicker than we were ready for them. But for Crush, their fourth LP, even the warped, bendy nature of Skeleton's songs has disappeared. Especially absent are the noisy freakouts found in numbers like “Live-Long,” moments that assured the audience that, although there was bright melody here, these boys were still capable of doing some damage — just you watch....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Born of the same Los Angeles Smell Club that brought us HEALTH, No Age and The Mae Shi, Abe Vigoda have come a long way since their 2006 debut Sky Route/Star Roof. If that release more or less conformed to the noise-shock no-wave template of the scene that begat them, then each subsequent album appears to have distanced them a little more from their beginnings. 2008's Skeleton was met with acclaim, and immediately saddled with a clumsy "tropical punk" label: all lush sunshine haze and hypnotic, rhythmic heat. Now with Crush, album number four, the band once again appear to have effected a marked swerve in their style and sound. The dominant and prevailing impression this time around is of an album rooted in the 1980s. This is the '80s of grandiose, wind-swept, big sounding music (Sequins, November); of Talk Talk's In My Life, audible in the vocal throughout, but in particular on Beverly Slope; of Johnny Marr's guitar jangle and the gothic darkness of The Cure. Echoes of all of these reverberate through the album in a remarkably authentic manner: most tracks here would not have sounded out of place on The John Peel Show circa 1984-85. The tropical warmth of Skeleton has now been replaced by a harder, darker, chillier core. Where words can be made out over the rich (sometimes over-layered) production, references appear to be to "ghosts", "black holes", "lives unknown", all this matching the generally angst-ridden and sometimes flat-out anguished tone of the vocal....full text |
Abe Vigoda lyrics
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