PRESS
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ANGELS OF LIGHT SING OTHER PEOPLE
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THE WIRE | ISSUE 256 JUNE 2005 | BY NICK SOUTHGATEA form of beautiful, rustic pop musicMichael Gira's recent employment as producer and label boss to Akron/Family has been a transforming experience for all parties. The energizing effect the younger group has had on Gira's creative energies and artistic output are copiously in evidence throughout these recordings. Together, they have produced a form of beautiful, rustic pop music. If Brian Wilson had crashed a motorcycle and holed up to recuperate at Big Pink with The Band, this is how the Basement Tapes would have sounded. Two constraints are adopted throughout, with almost total fidelity. Firstly, there are no drums. Secondly, all instruments are acoustic. Deviations add only color, not the volume and rhythm for which they would normally be exploited, with the exception of one coda. Certainly, it's a long way from the brutally physical sonic expression Gira pursued in the past with Swans. Instead, songs are propelled with pronounced riffs and strumming on guitars and extensive background vocals, of the "ba-ba-ba" or "Fa-fa-fa" variety. The effect can be jaunty and poppy, as on opening track "Lena's Song", rolling along over a bright guitar figure and ending in a massed......
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Larkin Grimm | Harpoon | Review
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Stylus Magazine ...slightly off-the-beaten-track folk music, but Grimm's is more primal and intense, and all the more thrilling for it.Before this summer the American South had, for quite some time, held something of a stranglehold on my imagination. Fueled by books, movies, and music, I daydreamed about haunted bayous and spirits dancing in and out of the trees. I envisioned beautifully rustic wooden shacks isolated on tiny islands in the middle of vast lakes. I imagined carefree folk being played on the porches of those shacks. Well, that was before this summer. After this summer, having decided to find these things a few months prior, I can confirm my expectations were somewhat European in their romanticism. What I found on my venture into the South was pretty much the same as everything else I found in America; convenience stores, fast food joints, and more convenience stores. So, all in all: yeah, something of a disappointment. I did have a moment of Southern magic, though. It just came as something of a shock that it happened whilst I was sitting next to a very obese man, feeling slightly queasy at having just eaten too many sweets, traveling across the country on......
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Akron/Family
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Innocent Words May/June issue | by Lisa ZygaAn album to enjoyThis is not an album to understand, but it is an album to enjoy. With a variety of pure, raw sounds (instrumental credits include “Fruity Computer Twiddling,†“Change†(as in jingling pennies), “Orchestral Computer Sentiments,†and “Bric-a-Bracâ€), Akron/Family seems to feign random episodes of spaciness until it hits you that everything fits together perfectly. And when a staticy song such as “Part Of Corey†glides into a folky, dreamy-guitar melody, you know there is a method to the beautiful madness. Akron/Family was recorded by four young musicians from rural America in a rented apartment in Brooklyn, and the result is neither rural nor New York City. The music is intimate and yet it brings the outside inside, sometimes implicitly and sometimes – as in the crashing surf and children’s voices in “I’ll Be On the Water†or the rain, birds and miscellaneous noises (“Bric-a-Bracâ€?) in “Interlude: Ak Ak Was the Boat They Sailed In On†– unmistakably realistic. The vocals gush sincerity, quietness and a self-developed quality, a style that defines the album. Listening to the lyrics themselves reveals paralyzing and abstruse insights, such as in “Fanny/ You’re Humanâ€: “please......
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Akron/Family
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Innocent Words May/June issue | by Lisa ZygaAn album to enjoyThis is not an album to understand, but it is an album to enjoy. With a variety of pure, raw sounds (instrumental credits include “Fruity Computer Twiddling,†“Change†(as in jingling pennies), “Orchestral Computer Sentiments,†and “Bric-a-Bracâ€), Akron/Family seems to feign random episodes of spaciness until it hits you that everything fits together perfectly. And when a staticy song such as “Part Of Corey†glides into a folky, dreamy-guitar melody, you know there is a method to the beautiful madness. Akron/Family was recorded by four young musicians from rural America in a rented apartment in Brooklyn, and the result is neither rural nor New York City. The music is intimate and yet it brings the outside inside, sometimes implicitly and sometimes – as in the crashing surf and children’s voices in “I’ll Be On the Water†or the rain, birds and miscellaneous noises (“Bric-a-Bracâ€?) in “Interlude: Ak Ak Was the Boat They Sailed In On†– unmistakably realistic. The vocals gush sincerity, quietness and a self-developed quality, a style that defines the album. Listening to the lyrics themselves reveals paralyzing and abstruse insights, such as in “Fanny/ You’re Humanâ€: “please......
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Akron/Family
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Tabletmag | by Robert HamAkron/FamilyThe picture on the insert for the disc makes this quartet look like your everyday rock band, although the music found here is anything but. We are treated to a swirling vortex of folk songs peppered with found sound samples and screeching interludes that break the lulling complacency this might otherwise induce. This debut CD is a gorgeous combination of performance, production and mixing by everyone involved. It will undoubtedly find a place in my top ten list this year....