Avi Buffalo: Like Bacon but not that much like Shins

I’ve been impressed recently with a new singer called Avi Buffalo. His song “What’s It In For?” caught me on first listen and I have felt compelled to go back to it over and over in the subsequent days. He is talented – it’s that type of indiepop with a shimmering quality. I think I read a comment somewhere that compared him to the Shins.

Now, I love the Shins. I swear – there are about six songs, a combination of say, 60% from Oh, Inverted World, 25% from Chute’s, plus I am addicted to “When I Goosestep”, which is actually by the pre-Shins band Flake Music, if I have my facts straight. (Wincing the Night Away.. I.. I feel really loyal to the Shins so I feel a bit guilty for saying this, but it didn’t grab me. Actually, “Girl Sailor” grabbed me. And some very hot and enjoyable things happened, but they’re private..)

I’m digressing a little – the point of the above was that the best of the best of the Shins represents, for me, the entropic heat death moment of the musical universe, at which point the atoms that constitute the pure unadulterated sugar of the Shins, are now spread equidistant across the entire universe, meaning that you have as much chance of hitting a Shins atom as you do of hitting an artist you haven’t heard before. This is my clumsy attempt to represent how much I love them. I could listen to Inverted World for ninety minutes and they would pop brainworm their way into my cranium and stay there for like a week. It’s disproportionate to whatever amount of time you put in to them. The only other band I can think of who’s like this – where you have as much chance reading about them, listening to them, as everyone else put together – is the colloidally-suspended atoms that constitute the Beatles.

So the Shins. Now Avi Buffalo has music on Sub Pop, apparently. Like the Shins. And I actually heard “What’s it In For?” on a free sampler that Sub Pop recently released, called Cybersex. I really love any and all promotional samplers from Sub Pop, as well as Merge and Matador … sort of the backbone of my universe. Really great labels, I’m surprised there isn’t more loyalty and praise for the labels as a whole. Nobody ever seems to talk about them. In any event, I don’t have the link in front of me, but you should look up Sub Pop cybersex blah blah. If you come to a hilarious satire of hideous ’90s web design, with lots of ASCII art and underlined words, you’re in the right place.

Oh, another band that Avi Buffalo brings to mind is the Band of Horses. I highly recommend the brainworm quality of “What’s it In For?” My only gripe with the lad is that he seems to like shock value in his lyrics – your lips are like two pieces of bacon – which I can do without. But as long as we’re not talking about Baby Bird (who has a fixation on being as disturbing and repellant in his topics and motifs as his music is pretty), a stunning tune will usually outweight it. Most of the time.