Album review: Abe Vigoda's 'Reviver'

If No Age wasn't the first band to nationalize the noisy Smell Scene, one can easily imagine Abe Vigoda beating them to it. On its intriguing new five-song EP "Reviver," the young Chino quartet dissolves its winsome vocal melodies in a no-wave guitar haze as it did on its 2008 breakthrough LP, "Skeleton." But this EP's slower tempos and darker timbres evoke a kind of sad, four-tracked Spector pop made in a foreclosed Inland Empire teenager's bedroom.

Opening track "Don't Lie" sits on a strong, single-note bass line but threatens to rip apart on the edges, as tracks of propulsive fuzz slip in and out of the mix. "Wild Heart," the record's best song, has all the impending doom of a Joy Division number but refracts it through ambient samples and a repeating guitar figure that's all the sadder for never reaching the typical crescendo.

Points are docked for including the half-realized noise experiment "Endless Sleeper," but "Reviver" captures one of L.A.'s most promising new bands beginning to come fully into its own.

-- August Brown

Abe Vigoda
"Reviver"
Post Present Medium
Two and a half stars

Comments

[ryan]

uh-"wild heart" is a cover song bozo...