Anyone who feels the world of music has become too jaded and cynical could do worse than peruse the Twitter feed of 19-year-old Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, frontman of California-based quartet Avi Buffalo. It offers 140-character bursts of enthusiasm directed at virtually everything. He is enthusiastic about his band's debut album: "I'm getting stokeder and stokedissimo!" He is enthusiastic about people from websites you've never heard of Tweeting him to solicit an interview ("Thanks so much for asking!"). He is enthusiastic about his forthcoming dates in Europe ("Holy crap! PARIS!") and enthusiastic about closed-source decompression freeware: "I GOT STUFFIT EXPANDER!" This latter would count as the point where you started thinking about calling in some kind of mental health professional, were it not for the fact that, God help him, he is also enthusiastic about Fearne Cotton, whose vocal support would cause many artists to immediately hock their instruments and start inquiring about staff vacancies in the local Argos. "Fearne! You ROCKKKKK!" he Tweets, a man safely ensconced on the west coast of America, happily knowing nothing of Fearne and Holly Go Dating, blithely unaware of the second series of Love Island, thousands of miles from the epicentre of the disaster that was Fearne Meets Peaches Geldof.
It's hard not to think that at least some of Zahner-Isenberg's enthusiasms might take a bit of a battering when he actually arrives in Britain: you picture him watching Celebrity Juice with an expression suggestive of a sudden decline in stokedissimo and the words "holy crap!" once more forming on his lips. Still, his tone of disbelief is understandable. A matter of weeks ago, Zahner-Isenberg was still begging fans to let band members kip on their sofas and funding tours by selling songs via the music distribution site Bandcamp, alongside blockbusting names such as Spaghetti Anywhere, Tallulah Does the Hula, and Rockin' Johnny Austin, author of a song about England's World Cup chances, optimistically titled Victory Day 2010. Now, Avi Buffalo find themselves fast-tracked to the position of this year's Fleet Foxes, the US Indie Band Most Likely to Cross Over From the Verbose Endorsements of Pitchfork.com to Mainstream Success Up to and Including the Baleful Patronage of Fearne Cotton.
It may have happened fast, but, nonetheless, it's fairly obvious why. If you were minded to play a game of American Indie Band Most Likely to Cross Over bingo while listening to their debut album, your dobber would be working overtime, so to speak. Keening post-Neil Young vocals in the manner of Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and Band of Horses? Check. Suitably mysterious lyrics, suggestive of greater depth and "weirdness" than your average Top 40-bound rock band? Check, not least "you are tiny and your lips are like little pieces of bacon". Music that evokes a proud heritage of classic late 60s American rock? Check, albeit a heritage less wilfully beardy than that of Fleet Foxes, who sounded like the last thing that got them stokedissimo was seeing the first horseless carriage pull up outside the general store. In this case, the reedy organ, undistorted sun-dappled guitars and harmonies swirled with reverb speak of the bands that proliferated on the Sunset Strip in the mid-60s, notably Da Capo-era Love, although the disconcertingly peculiar stare of songs such as Orange Skies and ¡Que Vida! is replaced with an ironically cocked eyebrow.
What chafes against the loveliness of the music isn't a sense of menace and darkness, but a kind of sour, knowing diffidence: on the evidence of his lyrics alone, you wouldn't have Zahner-Isenberg down as one of life's holy crappers. "I can feel you're on fire because you're drunk and I seem too cool," he sneers on the album's lead-off single, whose chorus ends with the question: "What's in it for me?" There are songs, abundant in beautiful tunes and twinkling guitar lines, called Five Little Sluts and Where's Your Dirty Mind?
The snottiness aside, you could argue that there's something faintly generic about Avi Buffalo's debut, that it pushes the buttons of one kind of music fan every bit as ruthlessly as a landfill indie band does to another. And yet you'd have to be fundamentally devoted to the cause of neophilia to allow the sense that there's nothing really new here overwhelm the sheer delight of the songwriting on offer. On Summer Cum, another frankly horrible title hides a transcendent melody that keeps spiralling skyward, defying the listener not to go with it. Can't I Know coos softly and gorgeously in your ear. At moments like that, Avi Buffalo sound like they're been propelled into the realm of Radio 1 and Later … With Jools Holland not because they fit a preconceived idea of good taste, but simply because they're good: it's hard to stop yourself feeling as enthusiastic as the guy who wrote them invariably seems to be.
