And so the spotlight settles on another LA based, The Smell affiliated band. 2008 has seen No Age make it big with their second, Health burst out with two albums in one year and The Mae Shi release one to moderate success and plenty of critical praise, now Abe Vigoda eject their effort into the world with Skeleton, their third album. These bands seem to share not just a geographical connection but an ancestral one also, punk blood flows through their veins. What is clear when these bands create albums, however, is that there is also a hell of a lot of psychedelic drugs in that blood too, making topsy-turvy punk, with flesh sloughing off faces, bright colours bruised into the black night, vomiting rainbows, hoarse screams of delight and dehydration, and in this context Abe Vigoda fits well.Notes picked close to the body of the guitar dominate this album, put through effects pedal(s), or some other technical trickery, they end up sounding like steel drums, especially during rhythmic sections like in ‘Bear Face’, and there’s also something of a woozy Wurlitzer in there too. The guitar sound is afforded a fair bit of space in the overall mix, spraying out, up and over the rhythm section, so much so that it can be a task to make out anything else, becoming quite suffocating in places. Just compare something like ‘Cranes’ with ‘Animal Ghosts’, the former’s swooping guitars sound like un-popped ears while the rhythm section clicks and taps away in a vacuum far away, the latter lets the drums off the leash and odd bits of stabbing bass get through, but it would seem that the latter is one of very few examples where the guitar sound isn’t so dominant.It has to be said that Skeleton can quite easily melt into one long track, the band have found a unique sound, or angle, that they pursue relentlessly throughout the whole album. The guitars playing those trilling and sometimes angular, atonal notes, artless warbling shouts from the singer, solid and occasionally great drumming (which can be so hard to clearly hear sometimes), and a bass that seems interesting but suffers the worst out of everything when it comes to the mix and production of Skeleton. The second half especially visits and revisits the same theme, with the exception of the instrumental ‘Visi Rings’ which sounds like a Wurlitzer that’s been mangled and distorted, and ‘Endless Sleeper’, where the band really nail a breathless delirious feeling, a rising melody that boils over into a droning electronic note.Abe Vigoda’s sound often gets called ‘tropical punk’, the only way in which that remotely fits is if you think of Robinson’s tropical flavour squash, with pineapples, mangos, satsumas and grapefruits all supposedly represented in the flavour, but really its just a bunch of chemicals called ‘flavouring agent 35E’, ‘Pottasium Sorbate’ and ‘aspartame’. More of a ‘delirious paranoid acid trip’ than ‘tropical punk’, really. 65% Abe Vigoda on MySpace