Avi Buffalo: "I'm not carrying any torch or pressurizing any hoses"

But Avi Zahner-Isenberg – that first name pronounced, once and for all, to rhyme with the surname of Elbow’s lead singer – is a hard man to pin down. He isn’t wilfully elusive. He’s just been away a while. His self-titled debut came out in 2010, and since wrapping up touring it, what’s he been doing in that time? “Listening to a bunch of great music,” and working on his second album.

“I got to know about sound and tone,” he tells me from his apartment in California, “and sometimes it’ll take you a year where you’ve heard a record a bunch of times, and then you learn a few things. You figure out something you’ve been waiting to get right, and you can put the finishing piece on it. That’s how I feel the record went a little bit.”

Like I said, Avi cares about sound. At one point in our conversation, he rhapsodises on percussion in a Phil Spector song. For about two minutes. “All the instruments are there for a reason. There’s this shaker that comes in for like two bars or something, and then it’s out completely. It only comes in on this really strange section at the end of a verse, and then it’s never back. It’s very short, and it’s very intentional, and it served this weird purpose that isn’t really describable by words. It sounds good, it’ll fill this space that somebody heard right there.”

“And I feel like every moment of Bacharach’s music is like that,” he adds. “Very orchestrated.”

At Best Cuckold is crammed with these orchestrated moments, ticking all the pop boxes you could hope for in a record. The perfect vocal harmony you hope will pop up always appears, even a shake of a tambourine sticks in your head for days on end. There’s the sugar-sweet McCartneyisms of "She Is Seventeen", the heartfelt "Memories of You", which somehow balances images of mourning relatives and erections resting on a girlfriend’s body, and the closing folk epic "Won’t Be Around No More", which could be heard as a spot-on homage to Dylan’s "I Shall Be Released". Ever-cool, Avi doesn’t seem to single that one out as anything too special, despite its personal origins: “I wrote it sitting on the couch with an acoustic guitar – I was about 20 at the time. I wanted to see that through to the end of the record. It’s just a typical heartbreak song I wrote after [Elise Ewoldt and I] broke up.”

But "Won’t Be Around", along with about half of Cuckold, plays up to a style of song that seems dear to Avi’s heart; he once called the record “my tribute to the ballad.” It’s a statement he seems to want to play down now; “[I’m] not carrying any torch or pressurizing any hoses,” he says. “That’s a quick little summation of one part of my song focus lately.”

He elaborates on quite what a ballad means nowadays: “I guess when I think ballads, I think piano. I wanted to incorporate a lot more piano on this record, because I knew just writing on guitar wasn’t going to make me feel like I was doing something that was versatile enough for myself. It’s sort of like a performative concept of someone my age being into something that’s called ‘a ballad’ because I feel like people don’t think about writing songs like that so much these days. Maybe they do.”

Avi makes a fair point, though. For a lot of new bands, songwriting sometimes seems to come second to what kinds of noises they can make with their pedals; how, if you own a Deerhunter album and something by Can, you’re suddenly a master of indie rock. When Avi gets started on the subject, you can tell it’s something that kinda pisses him off…albeit in a relaxed, distinctly Avi-ish kind of way.

“[Bands] should be doing both. I think people get really stuck into the vibe, rather than the quality of music or songs. I think a lot of that kind of music, some of it can be really great. Naturally we’re going to see something that somebody does well, and we’re going to see a bunch of people try to copy it because they think it’s easy. In reality, the bands they’re imitating are really good songwriters and musicians, and they have a lot more going on, but people just get sucked into ‘Oh there’s reverb, there’s a Krautrock production thing going on,” and they want to get into that and they think that’s the key.”

“To me, songwriting is like finding myself, exploring deep moods. When you have diversity in a song that comes from something expressed from yourself, it’s more like an internal thing rather than being like this cool thing. People have been plugging their guitars into their Tascam cassette recorders because it sounds bad in a cool way, and you want to go beyond that. And there’s a lot of amazing electronic music, which works in a completely different process. So people are not communicating enough sonically with each other – they don’t listen to enough different types of music.”

Avi tells me that there is one type of music that is apparently making a comeback around the California scene where he lives…and it’s surprising to hear how into it he is. “There’s definitely a line where stuff is happening right now in LA or California that’s like a post-glam rock kind of thing – a lot of post-eighties ironic hair bands.”

But we had that in the UK ten years ago, I remind him. Remember The Darkness?

“Right! The Darkness! That’s a cool-ass band. But now I feel like a lot of people round here are now trying to capitalize on whether or not people remember The Darkness. And it’s what happens – that’s why you’ve got to be doing your own thing. There’ll be people getting into surf rock…anything, but there’s always people making really good music too.”​

At Best Cuckold is out now via Sub Pop Records. Avi Buffalo is currently touring the UK - he plays Bristol's Thekla tonight (tickets) and London's Islington Assembly Hall Friday (tickets).