Long Beach indie rock band Avi Buffalo breaks up

Sad news for L.A. indie-rock fans: Avi Buffalo, the project from singer/guitarist Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, has called it day.

The Long Beach-based band was an expansion of Zahner-Isenberg’s virtuosic guitar playing and ‘90s-indie-inspired, unexpectedly dirty-minded songwriting. The band released two well-received albums for Sub Pop, 2010’s self-titled LP and 2014’s “At Best Cuckold.”

In a statement posted to the band’s Facebook page, Zahner-Isenberg affirmed that “The Avi Buffalo band is over; done with my 2-record-contract with SubPop and available to be anyone’s guitarist/songwriter/producer/engineer/whatever works, gonna keep makin’ music left and right. I have very much appreciated touching good people with this music, having a cool avenue through the world to perform it, getting to meet you whether it was in the USA, Canada or Europe, and working with some awesome musicians. I started it when I was a wee-15 year-old and it went WAY farther than I thought it could.”

The singer said, with uncommon candor for a band breakup announcement, that the attention on the project “ended up causing a lot more pain and drained my creative energy. It makes me wake up sick, confused, depressed, out of touch with myself and irrelevant to current music’s existence ... Other more exciting and meaningful creative endeavors are what I have sought after instead, and as I am a spritely, young 24 year old, I’ve gotta lot of work to do and no time to be devoted to a sluggish incarnation of my teenaged self.”

Though he said he has no plans to ever tour again (“touring sucks and isn’t worth it”), he added that “perhaps also after a while of working on other people’s stuff I could come up with something else of my own again, put it out on a label, tour, etc. It’s just gotta feel free if that happens. I will probably honestly be 40 or 50 when that happens and extremely fat.”

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