Avi Buffalo
Avi Buffalo

Four 19-year-olds composing a similar album. There's no comparison. At 19, I was lounging around all day, daydreaming in my little room while listening to music (sort of what I do now).
An 8-minute song like “Remember Last Time” should dispel any doubts of overestimation, my ears applaud every time I listen to it. A rock with a folk core that draws heavily from the rich roots of American music (classical, not traditional).

I imagine these kids listening to Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Tim Buckley, going through Buddy Holly, much of the sixties music: firstly Jimi Hendrix until they reach overseas to the sound of the Kinks or contemporaries Suede. This musical history stew is perfectly cooked by Avi Buffalo, who, by adding surf guitars “typically Californian” here and there, help transport their music beyond temporal or genre boundaries. It's clear how it's not difficult to occasionally hear the best interpreters of this hefty U.S. legacy in their sound: the Wilco. I don't attribute any originality to this band. There's nothing revolutionary in this debut, it's “simply” pure crystalline musicality.
The four from Long Beach are kids only on paper, we understand this with the guitars of “Truth Sets In”: its nostalgic symmetry offers what is a perfect musical transposition of a distant memory. Songs that seem to be made to capture like “What’s in it For?” reveal themselves to be much deeper than they seem, like the ancestral cries that extinguish it.

With Avi Buffalo, it's a game of mirrors where it's up to us to realize that it's pearls being cast. All the songs are enchanting, each in its own way. They flow swiftly one after another: the dragged-out litany of “Jessica”, the sweet country ballad of “One Last” (which winks at the irish-folk of Turin Brakes), the fluctuating moods of soul-rock in “Five Little Sluts”. Over it all hover the caustic trills of Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg (faithful even live) and dirty, seemingly stupid themes devoid of inhibitions, typical of the thoughts of horny adolescence. I'll let you decide whether the cynicism of “Summer Cum” appropriately represents them. It's never been so wonderful to be young and naive.

Awaiting the imminent second album, may a curse fall upon those who haven't listened to the best thing to come out of America in many years, vastly underrated... it's never too late to make amends, dear old folks.