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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
New York's folk/psychedelic quartet Akron/Family debuted with
Akron/Family (Young God, 2005), an album of
soundscape-oriented instrumental background music
for warbling surreal elegies and litanies of metaphysical loss.
Before and Again is mostly hummed against a backdrop of noises and
anemic guitar strumming.
Running Returning sounds like a pastoral lullaby torn between
zombie-esque vocal harmonies and gently jangling guitars.
Another "rustic" number, the languid Afford floats in a swamp of
howling guitars and natural sounds.
Shoes sounds like a psychedelic singalong, slowly decaying into
a chaotic jam.
Lumen, that opened with some chaotic atonal chamber music and
ghostly reverberations, evolves into the most robust rant.
But then Sorrow Boy seems to mimick orchestral pop and David Bowie's
pathetic melodramas.
Their touching Part of Corey and I'll Be on the Water
showed how the post-rock aesthetic could be applied to
Sufjan Stevens-like folk-rock melody.
The eight-minute Italy is an exercise in rubber-band aerodynamics,
a lengthy slumber slowly accruing tension that is eventually released in a fit
of grandeur.
Bubbling little noises disturb the flow of the song, a flow that is often
interrupted and casually restarted as if to deny the unity of melody and
arrangement that songs traditionally rely on.
There is always something angular and uncertain surfacing from the apparent
simplicity of the song.
The split album
Akron/Family & Angels Of Light (Young God, 2005)
continued the experiment of
Angels Of Light's
Sing Other People:
Michael Gira backed by
Akron/Family.
The first seven tracks are by the band without Gira, and craft a
grandiose and energetic sound
(Moment, the eight-minute Future Myth, the gospel-y Raising the Sparks).
The seven-song EP Meek Warrior (Young God, 2006) offers a hodge-podge of
different kinds of tantalizing music, from ballads (Gone Beyond)
to complex post-rock scores (Blessing Force, The Rider).
Generally speaking, Love Is Simple (Young God, 2007) acknowledged their
debts to the 1960s in a more explicit manner. The core of the album is
represented by the four mini-suites.
Ed Is A Portal begins with a massive singalong over pow-wow rhythm,
but then turns into a rollicking country litany with space synthesizers and
theatrical choirs.
Lake Song is a good example of how the Family can string together a few
random ideas and generate tribal/choral emphasis until it sounds like some
exotic primitive ceremony.
Disguised inside Of All The Things is a hippie litany with a
Neil Young-ian guitar solo.
Coherence is not exactly the overarching theme of these suites.
There's So Many Colors begins with a festive horns-driven folk fanfare
but ends in a Neil Young-ian guitar jam.
In between the band drops a few comic interludes, such as the Frank Zappa-esque I've Got Some Friends, and psychedelic
ditties, notably Pony's O.G., with a free-jazz instrumental bacchanal.
Compared with the first album, this is a more conceptual affair, of grander
proportions, that develops the ideas of tribal and choral post-hippie music.
The hare-krishna hymns of the Sixties have become existential rituals.
After the departure of Ryan Vanderhoof, the remaining trio
(Seth Olinsky, Miles Seaton, and Dana Janssen) penned the baroque,
eccentric
and varied Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free (Dead Oceans, 2009).
Two constructions stand out, the opening jam Everyone Is Guilty and
Gravelly Mountains of the Moon, but most of the rest is style for
the sake of style
that only occasionally (Sun Will Shine) is also moving.
The gently catchy
Many Ghosts and Set `Em Free provide ammunitions for a more
mainstream career.
Their youthful psychedelia was suddenly a distant memory.
The core of
II - The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT (2011) is made up of
elegant vignettes of another dimension,
peaking with the viscerally evocative closer Creator.
Different facets of mysticism surface in the
shamanic chant and dance of Silly Bears, in the
dreamy meditation of Islands and in the
supernatural vision of Another Sky.
Throughout the album there is manic attention to the chromatic values of sound
(including sounds of nature),
sophisticated ambience and virtuoso dynamics.
Melodies have never been their forte, but
the garage anthem So It Goes,
the solemn ballad Canopy and
the acid-folk litany Cast a Net
redefine the context of melody in purely spiritual terms.
Miles Seaton died in 2021.
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