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Abe Vigoda
Reviver
Post Present Medium
By Jose Fritz

The record begins with the unexpected—three seconds of overdubbed moaning vocals that drop into a fast-fingered, bass-driven song with squealing guitars in the back evoking early Killing Joke more than any two consecutive seconds from their last album. It really begs the question: Where is this band going?

While some parts of Reviver like "Endless Sleeper" engage in experimental noise diversions the bulk of the reverb-label tangents go elsewhere. It builds a song from nothing, the sound of feedback, reverb, static, bass hum and overdubbed vocals. There is no build up, and no crescendo, only a long drawn-out fade-out. It's probably the first time that I've clearly heard the voice of singer Michael Vidal.

On "Wild Heart" the wall of guitar echo takes on a Phil Spector quality, lifting the song up instead of occluding it. Similarly on "House" the reverb is shellacked onto clean-tone single-picked guitar notes to build a thicket of uncountable notes; a pin cushion for the chorus to sit on.

I think it was a surprise to us all to find that there were in fact bands from Los Angeles that are worth hearing. The city's punk rock roots are inarguable, but since that era it's been a cold hard decade of bupkis. That last ugly wave of LA glam bands came from the Sunset Strip.

Abe Vigoda has been lurking all the while at a club called The Smell in an alley off a block that is mostly composed of parking lots. It's only eight miles away but it's another world completely. It's a world grafittied from floor to ceiling, festooned with psychedelic skulls, snaking outstretched arms, lightning bolts, trumpets, and images of Betty Page. It is the quintessential art space and by extension, an incubator for local art rock.

Their vein of experimentalism still lies exposed. If you recall, their first EP Sky Route/Star Roof was a mess of distortion, low fidelity and guitar effects. The songs were an airborne and intelligible mess. Skeleton was closely related, but the fidelity was much improved. The fog was lifted and if not us, at least the band could at least see what they had wrought. Now, with the past and present clear to them, they fall to earth, but I know not where.

For two beautiful foundational EPs they were compared to Mae Shi, Arab on Radar, Silver Daggers, Wavves, Women, and No Age. Their last album Skeleton was still unwieldy with newness and buried vocals. Here we are mere months later, illegally sharing these new tracks on Limewire dumbfounded. All we know now is that all our predictions derived from Skeleton were wrong.