Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo (From Salisbury Journal)

Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo

3:22pm Wednesday 30th June 2010

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Artist - Avi Buffalo
Album - Avi Buffalo
Label - Sub Pop

The Sub Pop label is some handy shorthand for high expectations from a debut album, and this album does not disappoint.

Avi Buffalo is the adopted name of 19-year-old Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, and the music they make (appropriately for Long Beach, Californians, perhaps) is summery, wistful pop, but the kind that you'd hope The Shins would make if they took some time to just hang out.

Fashionably-enough, the music also features the kind of ecstatic mass choruses and hand claps that seem essential all of a sudden. But that doesn't diminish the feel-good factor from what is a throw-back to a 70s Buffalo Springfield reminder, brought bang up to date.

No song on the album matches the lead single, What's In It For, but, like Band of Horses, the feel becomes the idea, and all of a sudden you're out the other side, blessed out and hitting repeat.

Rating 8/10
Mike Rea

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