Review Summary: More interesting music from LA.
Abe Vigoda might be on Late Night with Conan O’Brien one day,
You might see him, an old, established American actor, and feel a wave of sympathy overcome you: once successful, now reduced to being the butt of the odd, insensitive joke about old age.
But I’ll tell you one thing, if I had a band as cool as Abe Vigoda named after me, I would be incapable of feeling shame. Yeah; if Joe Katz played the same blend of curious, excitable punk as Abe Vigoda does, my face wouldn’t turn nearly as red as it does when those dern bullies pull my underwear up over-top my head. But personal discomfitures aside, Kid City, Abe Vigoda’s debut album, is impressive, to say the least. It’s eclectic, but everything still feels like it’s bound by the same force; like a pair of step-siblings or two different flavor cakes made by the same baker. On Tom Tom Sun Abe is frantic, with the band’s singer, Michael Vidal, calling desperately over disparate instrumentation, while Power Place has the band mixing Animal Collective-y yelping vocals with stop-start math-rocky dynamics. Kid City, the second track on the album, presents itself as a welcome pick-me-up after Untitled’s abrasive dronings. The drums clatter and pop, while guitars lead the metaphorical charge into the track’s high-energy pre-chorus, a happy marriage of dissonant chords, jumpy bass and yapped lyrics, and dually into the slightly lamer Wolf Parade-aping chorus.
Coming from the same LA noise pop scene as No Age, The Mae Shi, HEALTH and Miko Miko, Vigoda is going to earn a lot of unfair comparisons to all artists aforementioned, and a lot of them, unfortunately, will appear negative. Kid City is amusing, stimulating: a blend of genres above and below the dial, but it still doesn’t quite reach the levels of creativity, hilarity or overall perfect-ness that some of its contemporaries have mastered. Still if you walk past Abe Vigoda, the man himself, on the streets of New York, perhaps enjoying a bagel or depositing money in a road-side ATM, make sure to remind him how good he has it.
And you if walk past Joe Katz on the streets of New Haven make sure to remind him that there is no such band as Joe Katz, and they didn’t release a solid indie record in the form of Kid City. I think he’ll appreciate that.
- Joe Katz
