Abe Vigoda
BIOGRAPHY
L.A.’s downtown noise and experimental music venue The Smell has nurtured some great bands over the years. No Age, The Mae Shi and Mika Miko have all honed their craft inside its four walls, and Abe Vigoda are yet another product to break forth into the wider world. The band are named after the actor of the same name, most famous for his role in The Godfather (he’s the Italian one), and to date have released four very different albums.
The band consists of Juan Velazquez (guitar/vocals), Michael Vidal (guitar/vocals), David Reichardt (bass), and Dane Chadwick (drums), forming after Velazquez and Vidal met at a Mika Miko gig atThe Smell while they were still at high school. The band started out as an essentially bog-standard noise-punk outfit, inspired by what they had seen at The Smell, and released their first full length album Sky Route/Star Roof in 2005.
Their second album, Kid City, followed not long after, and followed their debut’s lo-fi production and noisy, shouty style. On the back of the album the band amassed a dedicated local following, and went out on tour to support XBXRX and Chromatics. During this time the band started to experiment with new sounds, incorporating Caribbean rhythms and chord sequences into their virile punk.
The resulting album, 2008’s Skeleton, was described (somewhat sarcastically) by the band as “tropical punk rock” which, whether they meant it or not, is a pretty accurate description of what the band had created. Rolling rhythms and guitars tooled up with reverb and short delay to make them sound metallic and almost steel drum-like give the short, punchy songs a dimension not found on any of their earlier work. In response to the perceived African and Caribbean influences on the album, the band jokingly compared themselves to Vampire Weekend, even listing them as an influence on MySpace, before the New Yorkers offered the band a supporting slot on their tour.
Not content to rest on their laurels, the band endeavoured to reinvent their sound yet again for their next album, releasing the stop-gap Reviver EP as a sampler of their new sound. The band’s obsession with Sonic Youth supposedly prompted the change, incorporating guitar sounds that were not exclusively clean, and creating an altogether fuller sound that the band themselves admit sounds a little like My Bloody Valentine at times.
The addition of synths and beefed up drums on their 2010 album Crush added to the unfamiliar sound, with some tracks bearing more resemblance to dance music than that of their early albums. The influence of British post-punk of the 70s and 80s is clear to hear across the album, with the band even incorporating Michael Vidal’s baritone vocals to give some of the tracks an essence of Joy Division, a comparison the band are far from ashamed of.
The band are currently out on a short European tour, culminating in a Rockfeedback gig at London’s Shacklewell Arms on 18th June. The band’s live show shows all the hallmarks of a band raised in L.A.’s punk underground, and has progressed and evolved alongside the revolutions heard on their albums into a formidable beast. With the oldest member of the band still only 25, you feel there is much more to come from the band, especially if they continue to make music that gets described as a “punked up version of Paul Simon’s Graceland”. And if that’s not enough to get you listening, then I may as well just give up.
Tour Dates
13th June - Paradiso, Amsterdam
17th June - Fleche d’Or, Paris
18th June - Shacklewell Arms, London – Rockfeedback Gig
15th July - Los Angeles Zoo, Los Angeles
21st July - The Echo, Los Angeles
Links
Videos
Throwing Shade
Dream Of My Love (Chasing After You)
Skeleton (Acoustic)