BY IAN HRABE
Right before Abe Vigoda played I was asked to submit a question to the band on behalf of The Pitch. Everyone was getting asked, so I submitted the one I always wanted to know: Why the fuck would you name your band Abe Vigoda?
Not to say that Abe Vigoda the man isn't awesome (if only by his prowess for staying alive despite looking like he's had one foot in the grave since Good Burger), but it's a pretty shitty band name. I wondered if the band would address these questions on stage, but, thank god, it didn't. Instead, Abe Vigoda brought more energy to Lawrence than most bands bring to the Bible Belt, despite the fact that the band's songs tend to blend together into one riff-laden mass.
Every review you will read of Abe Vigoda's latest record, 2007's Skeleton, prominently describes their sound as "tropical punk," which is actually kind of stupid. It's not like someone's got a marimba going at the side of the stage or anything. Or maybe I'm just calling bullshit because all of the new songs (of which there were many) sounded like mid-'80s so-cal SST Records punk (Hüsker Dü immediately came to mind).
I spent most of the show watching the hands of guitarists Juan Velasquez and Michael Vidal wondering how the fuck the seemingly random finger movements were making such cool, precise, and yes, sometimes tropical sounds. It was like watching all of Greg Ginn's sludgy guitar riffs from Black Flag's My War played ten times faster.
Los Angeles has certainly bred a fine crop of young, hungry punk bands in the last five years. All of these bands are well aware of the roots of West Coast punk yet the best bands in the Smell Scene try to push the genre forward. Though the highly innovative No Age is king of the scene, Abe Vigoda should be its successor in case of demise. Abe has a vitality that groups like Mika Miko lack, thanks to a tendency to emulate music of the past rather than working in the modern age. Yet Abe has one fatal flaw: most of its songs sound the same. And while the group's set was exciting for about a half hour, the 20 minutes that followed felt excessive.
Opener Talbot Tagora suffered from the same problem, the exception being that this group's set wasn't inspiring in the least. Tagora sounded enough like Abe Vigoda for it to make sense that it was touring with Vigoda, yet Tagora's set-up of two lead guitarists and a drummer was pretty disastrous. Too much guitar! Too many angular riffs! I can only take so many angular riffs before I have to go outside. Maybe the group's record sounds better, but live, it just sounded like a noisy, aimless mess.
Boo and Boo Too, on the other hand, played the best set I've seen this Lawrence band play in maybe a year...and it was only five songs long. The bassist and guitarist were out on tour with Justin Ripley, so ex-members Luke and Drew resumed their respective places. Maybe Boo and Boo Too just plays better when shit goes wrong -- when band members are out of town or when they quit and they have to scramble to get their shit together.
However, it would be nice if frontman Barrett Emke's voice wasn't always coated with so much reverb. It makes his vocal lines sound half-hearted and bland. It was cool the first time I saw the band do it three or four years ago, but I think the songs would be more effective if it sounded like an actual human was singing them.
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