PRESS
Akron/Family | Live Review
LA Weekly | Bernardo Rondeau
The new album's rampant eclecticism and savage agility are in fact closer to the group's live sound
Dec 06
Akron/Family
The Echo (LA Live Preview)
Rock & Pop
Released on the Devendra Banhart discoverin' Young God imprint last year, Akron/Family's debut album proudly wore its soft, patchwork skin. Swathed in the gentle hiss of bare rooms and rehearsal spaces, its bricolaged songs, shimmering and amorphous, proved a calm island amid the churning acid-bath tides of new weird America. Humbly titled Meek Warrior, Akron/Family's follow-up is a bolder experiment in human energy harnessed for instant invention. Flaring with random ecstasies, the Brooklyn-based quartet morph wildly from all-over electric splatter to oak-hued jangle to an Arkestral freeform cheer squad. Though fiercely communal, the band intersperse their vibrant tumult with lapses of open-faced vulnerability often intoned with a twangy melancholia. The new album's rampant eclecticism and savage agility are in fact closer to the group's live sound: a bristling churn of an erudite imagination.