PRESS
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Akron/Family | interview and review
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splendid magazine | jennifer kellystrange, natural soundsThe album starts simply, barely, as if a young man were sitting beside you, strumming a guitar, breathing gently in your ear. Gradually, an unearthly series of pings and tones and beeps intervenes, turning this simple folk music into something new and magical. "Before and Again", the first track from Akron/Family's self-titled debut, immediately immerses you in a world both strange and familiar -- the kind of place you might visit only in dreams. This track, and the twelve that follow it, are the work of four young men who converged on Brooklyn a couple of years ago, working on their home-recorded songs in isolation, without enough instruments to fill the sound. Gradually, they began to incorporate ordinary noises into their music -- the clink of glass, the hum of breath blown across bottles, the creak of an old wooden chair, sticks beating against apartment walls. They sent fragments of their music to labels, and Michael Gira responded; he encouraged them with the most eccentric, individual aspects of their work, and told them to forget the more generic rock band songs they'd been preparing. He eventually agreed to help them turn their sounds into......
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Akron/Family | interview and review
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splendid magazine | jennifer kellystrange, natural soundsThe album starts simply, barely, as if a young man were sitting beside you, strumming a guitar, breathing gently in your ear. Gradually, an unearthly series of pings and tones and beeps intervenes, turning this simple folk music into something new and magical. "Before and Again", the first track from Akron/Family's self-titled debut, immediately immerses you in a world both strange and familiar -- the kind of place you might visit only in dreams. This track, and the twelve that follow it, are the work of four young men who converged on Brooklyn a couple of years ago, working on their home-recorded songs in isolation, without enough instruments to fill the sound. Gradually, they began to incorporate ordinary noises into their music -- the clink of glass, the hum of breath blown across bottles, the creak of an old wooden chair, sticks beating against apartment walls. They sent fragments of their music to labels, and Michael Gira responded; he encouraged them with the most eccentric, individual aspects of their work, and told them to forget the more generic rock band songs they'd been preparing. He eventually agreed to help them turn their sounds into......
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Akron/Family | interview and review
()
splendid magazine | jennifer kellystrange, natural soundsThe album starts simply, barely, as if a young man were sitting beside you, strumming a guitar, breathing gently in your ear. Gradually, an unearthly series of pings and tones and beeps intervenes, turning this simple folk music into something new and magical. "Before and Again", the first track from Akron/Family's self-titled debut, immediately immerses you in a world both strange and familiar -- the kind of place you might visit only in dreams. This track, and the twelve that follow it, are the work of four young men who converged on Brooklyn a couple of years ago, working on their home-recorded songs in isolation, without enough instruments to fill the sound. Gradually, they began to incorporate ordinary noises into their music -- the clink of glass, the hum of breath blown across bottles, the creak of an old wooden chair, sticks beating against apartment walls. They sent fragments of their music to labels, and Michael Gira responded; he encouraged them with the most eccentric, individual aspects of their work, and told them to forget the more generic rock band songs they'd been preparing. He eventually agreed to help them turn their sounds into......
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Akron/Family
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Harp | by Russell CarlsonblurbThis Brooklyn-based quartet subtly adds a digital ingredient to the psychofolk recipe, laying blips, bleeps and computer-cut vocals atop beds of harmony, rich, pastoral folk- pop. Just when the music gets fragile, the band changes course with a short blast of white noise. Call it fractured Americana....
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AKRON/FAMILY
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HARP Magazine | by Fred MillsAkron/FamilyBrooklyn’s Akron/Family undoubtedly has close philosophical ties to Young God labelmate Devendra Banhart as well as such “old wyrd folk†and outsider-psych outfits as Charalambides, Tower Recordings and Six Organs Of Admittance. Yet amid the down-home picking, inward-looking vocals and occasional bursts of tape hiss and cacophonous noise is an endearingly poppy quality. “I’ll Be On The Water†starts out on a gentle acoustic note but eventually turns into a dense, luminous, Flaming Lips-like symphony, while the deftly-picked “Before And Again†arcs from a rootsy Nick Drake vibe into an otherworldly orbit of strings, electronic bleeps and massed vocal harmonies. With other influences as disparate as Radiohead (main vocalist Ryan Vanderhoof sometimes sounds like Thom Yorke, or possibly a more twisted Neil Young), the Beach Boys and the Band, Akron/Family stitches up a colorful patch – loose threads and uneven seams included – and applies it directly to rock’s so-called rich tapestry....