Abe Vigoda – “Throwing Shade” 7”
PPM, 2010
Acquired: Crossroads Music, Used, 2013
Price: $2
In my head, Abe Vigoda is a neo-punk band that came up with
No Age in LA in the late 00s. The trouble is, I’m having the hardest time
remembering what they sounded like on their breakout album Skeleton. I remember liking it a bunch, and seeing them live a
couple of times, but the sonics are absent. I know for sure they sound like a
totally different band on “Throwing Shade,” the lead single from their Skeleton follow up Crush. I never heard that one because it was released in my “I am
never listening to new music ever again goddamnit!” phase, which lasted for the
tw years immediately after I graduated college (an effect of working at a
college radio station for three years and living, breathing, sleeping,
drinking, absorbing by osmosis every hot new album that showed up in the mail
every Monday). The one thing I vaguely remember about Abe Vigoda was their
angular, chiming guitars wrapped around spastic punk structures but filtered
through layers of reverb. “Throwing Shade” is a straight up dance track jam
packed with New Order synthesizers (and structure, for that matter) with a
heaping scoop of dark wave drizzled over the top. The guitars still chime like
the used to, but just a little, and just barely. While the song is technically
fine, it’s boring and way too derivative of New Order and the rest of the 1980s
new wave/post punk ilk to leave any lasting effect. B-side “Vivid” is firmly
mapped on the post punk spectrum of that period, and suffers the same ill
effects as “Throwing Shade” in that it abandons all of the interesting stuff the
band was doing in favor of singing songs that have already been sung a thousand
times before.
"Throwing Shade"
"Vivid"
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