Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
“I’ve waited for your love
I got lost in your summer cum
Leave all your stains with me
And know that I will never be
Allowed to walk right next to you
And be that one that you ought to”
Summer cum. That phrase, taken from the song of the same name, sums up Avi Buffalo’s self-titled debut succinctly. Hazy, laid back, warm, sticky, slightly perverse, maybe trying just a tad too hard. The band likely didn’t intend for seasonal ejaculate to be the defining moment on their debut, but it fits for an album so completely of its time. In its sun-smeared slack the album saddles up alongside the forerunners of 2009’s lazy, lo-fi beach pop craze. In its fragile, folkier moments it recalls the manicured, slow moving majesty of Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes. With its persistent, youthful sexuality the album sounds like a sequel to The xx’s own self-titled debut, only born from too much weed instead of valium.
Yes, frontman Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg (what choice did he have but to be in a band with a name like that?) and company have molded the aural equivalent of summer cum and it’s easy to get lost within the goo. Unfortunately, the realization that what your lost in could become a flaky stain on the inside your underwear hangs over the album throughout its seeping runtime. Avi Buffalo is inescapably designed for doing very little during the warm months of 2010. Come 2011, or even fall, the album could well appear as some crass amalgamation of a bunch of short-fused old fads that have long ago fizzled into irrelevance.
In a few years Avi Buffalo’s debut could well be little more than a time capsule for that time when everyone in their twenties felt like quitting their job in order to get drunk and make mistakes in the sun, but it sounds fine right now. It’s got summer and it’s got cum and it’s hard to argue with either of those.
