(This record review appeared in the OC Weekly and Seattle Weekly.)
Abe Vigoda want to be Animal Collective, and Skeleton makes this plainly obvious. “Lantern Lights” and “Animal Ghosts,” in particular, could be rough demos from Strawberry Jam. Both tracks bounce with those same Romper Room yelps, neon tribal beats and Looney Tunes melodies. But what the LA quartet want and what they can actually pull off are vastly different.
Despite early dalliances with what can only be tagged “twee noise,” Animal Collective have always been whimsical indie kids dedicated to pure pop in terms of composition and production. If the boys bust some gnarly freakout, which they’re prone to do, it’s almost always in service of a sun-tanned tune inspired by the Beach Boys circa ’68. Abe Vigoda, by contrast, are children of a different West Coast tradition: the chaotic hardcore and freak rock of Deerhoof, Total Shutdown, Antioch Arrow, Black Flag and so on, all the way back to Captain Beefheart. They don’t lull fans into California dreams; they keep them agonizingly awake, employing laborious anti-grooves and sonic claustrophobia.
Had Abe Vigoda abandoned their sound while chasing Animal Collective’s tail, then Skeleton would be insufferable — a total fish-out-of-water experience. The band, however, wisely retrofitted their deeper musical heritage with current interests. Of course, fusing such divergent aesthetics makes Skeleton a schizoid listening experience. But that appears to be their goal as punk tricksters (there’s a lot of them in LA these days). All the good stuff on Skeleton that sounds like Strawberry Jam disarms you with promises of good-time pop music. And once Abe Vigoda know your shields have been lowered, they then pummel your noggin like a special-ed spazz after three cans of Jolt and a Charleston Chew. If joy-equals-pain is your bag, it doesn’t get much better than Skeleton.
I’ve always believed that traditional music + punk rock is an aesthetically bankrupt proposition. That’s why I don’t listen to Gogol Bordello or any other band tagged gypsy-punk or klezmer-punk or cow-punk or Celtic-punk. Despite the very noble but ultimately misguided notion that all music is folk music, there exist irreconcilable differences between punk’s self-righteous amateurism and the finely crafted simplicity of folk music. To try to fuse the two is like IKEA designing easy-to-assemble Shaker furniture complete with that crappy little Allen wrench.
yal Trux’ Thank You and Exile on the Main St.-era Stones. It’s a 100-year-old land tortoise rambling through the decayed outskirts of nearly every town between here and Omaha. Webb is a shaggy outsider. He mumbles about dreams and work and life and all kinds of stuff he’s too young to know, yet does. To get all aggro about it: Webb plays blues rock the way indie hacks like Howlin’ Rain can only dream of.
Some blog-like entity called Losanjealous recently wet its panties over this Beachwood Sparks reunion. In fact, they announced it as the big event of Sub Pop’s 20th-anniversary shindig. Of course, there’s something like 12 billion blogs out there, so the post only generated a measly three comments. But all of them came from old-school Sub Pop devotees kindly asking Losanjealous to take a long walk off a short plank. Green River and The Fluid rising from their musty coffins is the real news, they said.
Neo soul, indie soul, retro soul, or whatever you call it comes ‘n’ goes in waves. And these days, the waves are definitely cresting. There’s Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Erykah Badu’s dazzling return, Quantic Soul Orchestra, the wah-wah grit of Philly’s Blue Method, and even them smooth, blue-eyed Brits: Duffy, Lidell, and Winehouse.
