Akron/Family Albums (4)
'Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free'
Release Date 5/1/2009
Tracks 11
Label Crammed
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Chances are that, a couple of years from now, punters will look back at Akron/Family's Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free as the transitional album in the band's catalog. In 2007, lead vocalist Ryan Vanderhoof left after recording the adventurous Love Is Simple, leaving the group a trio. Seemingly undaunted, Seth Olinsky, Miles Seaton, and Dana Janssen recruited engineer and co-producer Chris Koltay, and enlisted nine other musicians to create the most far-reaching, margin-breaking set of the band's career to date. Where Love Is Simple seemed -- and was for the time -- groundbreaking, Akron/Family were continuing to split themselves off from the whole post-psychedelic free folk underground and pursue something they would feel comfortable expanding toward. One song might feature acoustic balladry while another would be a full-on rock fest, while another would be a tribal workout and another might have some post-prog overtones. On Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, the ideas are even less conceptual but more satisfying and more focused in songwriting and production. First, there's the great cover nod to Sly's There's a Riot Goin' On, though on this American flag the stitches are frayed and the field of stars has been blurred into something like a weather map representing a tropical storm. It reflects mightily what's in the grooves. Here many ideas are not only considered but fully attempted -- often in the same track. Take for instance "Everyone Is Guilty," the cut that opens the set. There are no less than six tempo changes, though it opens with a slippery funky backbeat, Afro-beat percussion, and a slinky yet propulsive bassline before entering a hooky, Beatlesque rock chorus, layering in strings, taut snare, and kick drum, and then chanting above hard rock riffs, a pop bridge, and prog rock exercises in arpeggiatic crescendo. It may sound like a mess, but it's tight as a fist hammering on musical genres and cracking them open wide. "MBF" is every bit as crackly and proggy as Yes in the middle of a wide-open live jam -- complete with a Chris Squire seal-of-approval bass pattern. "Many Ghosts" is a nursery rhyme cum country song with strings, harpsichords, and elegiac rock overtones, all of them sweet and tender. They get underscored with a Jack Nitzsche-esque wordless vocal and string chorus for a few seconds as a bridge and handclaps join it a few seconds later. The effect is gorgeous, and if you can simply let this rather stunning set of surprises wash over you, you will be delighted. Forget the pack-it-in-tight methodology of Animal Collective, Akron/Family give everything its proper sense of space and atmosphere. Check out the lovely, hypnotic guitars and tom-toms in "Sun Will Shine," with its single line sung over and again in staggered choruses before fading and becoming an avant New Orleans funeral march of sorts as "Auld Lang Syne" is quoted by the horns to close it, played as if by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This properly announces the album's final track, "Last Year." This cut has only two lines: "Last year was a hard year, for a very long time/This year is gonna be ours." With three-part harmony accompanied by a piano, it's a gospel song sung by people who have no idea how to or perhaps even know what gospel music is, but they can feel it, and it sums up the entire sprawling message of this record as evidenced by its title: that this new free and wild Akron/Family are, by the very fact of their restlessness, creating music that will resonate for its inspiration and execution. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The most beautiful thing about the Akron/Family, this collective quartet of New York musicians who record for Michael Gira's Young God label, is that they are virtually unclassifiable. Is it rock? Post-rock? Acid folk? Freak folk? Free improvisation? Ultimately, who cares what it is, that it is is what matters most, and that is displayed prominently on this seven-cut "special album" (according to Gira). It's over 35 minutes, and includes the nine-plus-minute opus "Blessing Force" that moves from silence to rock-out mantra, to chant to intricate polyrhythmic interplay to free-form, improv, wig city back to guitar, bass, drums zone-out to skronk. All you can say for a brief second is "Oh yeah," before they enter with acoustic guitars, hand percussion and the paraphrased English translation of a Buddhist mantra on "Gone Beyond." There's melody and beauty and space and earth in sharp contrast to the fire of the previous cut. The vocals here are utterly beautiful and joyous and the spiritual vibe is set. Clocking in at only 3:22, it would have been interesting to hear what this might have been like at ten minutes. Alas. In any case, Akron/Family are up to what they do best here: shatter expectations, turn their own music inside out along with the heads of everybody listening. When they re-enter the known world it's only for a few minutes, as the brief folk song that is the title track blends fractured banjo (hmmm Magnolia Electric Co?), guitars and four-part harmony, as well as the thrum of an electric bass for a few seconds. All the listener can say is "bring it on: more, more, more." Those who dig the most acoustic side of the group will be more than blissed out by the rest of this set, which moves into droning, whole-tone psych-folk, sheer acoustic improvisation that is utterly melodic and into "No Space Is This Realm," which gradually moves into overtone music on trombone, harmonium, and hand percussion . What is so ultimately rewarding about Akron/Family is that these tunes are crafted, slowly and purposefully. Their parts are grafted in without seams or abrupt juxtapositions. Even "The Rider (Dolphins)," another wild, multi-part jam that follows the dreamy "Lightning Bolt of Compassion," is done gently. Once given the opportunity, this band, no matter how seemingly chaotic their sounds are from the outside, will seduce as well as astonish. The final song, "Love and Space," offers real release and plenty of what the track promises; it's a sacred hymn and a mantra joined at the bellies and it sends the disc off into silence on a note of peace. Akron/Family are a spiritual wonder as well as a musical one. They are a quartet who've listened to a lot of music, everything form the Incredible String Band, the chanting and prayer of Tibetan Monks and the music of Madagascar, to the Flaming Lips and yet what they've created on Meek Warrior is something wholly their own; it's filled with sophisticated yet welcoming changes in texture, dynamic, and form/genre that seem effortless, not forced or idiosyncratic for its own sake. Meek Warrior is their most realized outing to date. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
'Akron/Family & Angels of Light'
Release Date 11/8/2005
Tracks 12
Label Young God
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
On Akron/Family & Angels of Light, the most functional if unrelated family in Brooklyn shares disc space with Angels of Light, a band made up of Akron/Family plus Young God Records honcho Michael Gira. There's nothing weird about the pairing -- the four Akron members simply stop being fake kin for a while and join Gira for the record's final five songs -- but few would venture to say the disc itself is not weird. Which doesn't preclude it from sounding great. Step right up, says the first half, with its moments of Beatles-inspired introspection that blow up into skronk-spiced sonic freakouts. The band tempers these ("Moment" is a good example) with warm blasts of country-folk on the order of "We All Will," lest the avant-garde folk crowd feel marginalized. It's thoughtful music that, for all its psychedelic schizoid Zeppelin-inspired atmospheric tweaks, feels put together by a gang of guys bent on a singular vision for crazy perfection. Seven tracks is not enough. By the time Gira joins the party with his half of the disc, then, a listener's liable to worry that he'll undo all the rambunctious joy that's come before him. But he doesn't: opening with a respectable cover of Dylan's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant," he snaps the madcap mood with a surefooted all-country voice but preserves an essential passion. Young God disciples shrink from the freak-folk designation, but here they run little risk of encountering it. Pair Akron/Family with Angels of Light and what you get, apologies to the label-sensitive, is Grade A art rock. ~ Tammy La Gorce, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Akron/Family's self-titled debut for Young God has its share of opaque psych-folk weirdness. After all, each of the Brooklyn band's four principal members receives a "bric-a-brac" credit next to the more conventional listings for guitar, piano, melodica, glockenspiel, and percussion, and unidentifiable noises have a way of splattering suddenly across the album's plaintive acoustics. "Part of Corey," for example, is two minutes of tape splicing and hiss before a gentle ballad rises above the wind noise. This penchant for matching squelchy electronics to analog instruments will land them immediately with a New Hippie tag, if their beards don't do it first. But the quartet isn't limited to that sound. They integrate it with an indie rock aesthetic (Flaming Lips, Palace), and songs like "Italy," "Afford," and "Before and Again" are plucky, even mostly catchy, and having that bit of structure takes Akron/Family a long, long way. It's not off-putting when the twining, weeping guitars in "Afford" suddenly start alternating with heavy reverb and field recordings of birds -- if anything, the experimentation makes the song stronger. "Lumen" is another highlight; it begins with whining cellos and shifts to a stilted British folk sound before becoming something closer to orchestral pop. "Running, Returning" is strong, too -- with its melding of animalistic percussion, layered voices, pleading melody, and hints of electronic noisemaking to the lo-fi aesthetic, it's a pretty solid primer for the record's overall feel. ~ Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide
