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The Last Tree | Larking Grimm | Review
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ALL MUSIC GUIDE | Ned Raggett Grimm moves between full arrangements and stark, stripped down efforts featuring just her and her guitar.Larkin Grimm's second album for Secret Eye shows that her knack for strikingly theatrical songs and performances remains strong. If no album can quite capture the sheer, surprising, enjoyable warmth and vividness of her live work (persuading an audience to howl joyously like wolves is just one small part of it), this is still much more than simply an audio souvenir. Working with a pool of collaborators including family members and fellow singer/performer Lara Polangco, Grimm moves between full arrangements and stark, stripped down efforts featuring just her and her guitar. If the term "acid folk" -- or the even more overused "freak folk" -- is long since starting to wear out its welcome, it's because it doesn't quite capture the blend of styles artists like Grimm bring to bear; it's as much hints of drone and film soundtrack orchestrations as it is unplugged guitar in a dark, mystic landscape. Perhaps it's no surprise that the song lengths themselves vary widely, from barely two-minute long pieces like "The Sun Comes Up" to the over-ten-minute long "Little Weeper," the latter......
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Larkin Grimm | Review
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George Parsons, Dream MagazineThese folkish excursions are fraught with translucent hallucinations and nuanced floating smoke dreams. If you could merge Devendra Banhart and Fursaxa into one being; it might sound like this. ...
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Larkin Grimm | Review
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The Wire | Nick SouthgateHer voice not only soars high, but swings low and earthy under itself.- Nick Southgate, The Wire...
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Larkin Grimm | Parplar | Review
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Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange | Mark S. Tucker Many people study zen or meditate and then babble about it, but few ever live it.Larkin Grimm is one of those few, though I've no idea if she ever cracked open a book or entered a zendo. She has, however, been initiated in shamanic practice and led a life that reads like something from the annals of Ikkyu. While studying at Yale, she fled the suffocating pretense of academe before it boiled her brain and liquidated her nerves. Her parents were cultist hippies and her non-atomic upbringing has installed the woman with a sharp sense of the sardonic, always the trait of observant intelligence. To this day, she's had no fixed address and prefers living in the woods, but has recruited the attentions and friendships of such musicians as Devendra Banhart and Spires That In The Sunset Rise (one of my fave new prog groups), with whom she's shared bills. The reason's not hard to see. For someone who got serious about the musical arts only four years ago, the depth of her powers are heady. The promo lit claims Grimm sounds like a woman in "full orgasmic release", unfortunately a......
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Akron/Family - Interview
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Pitchfork | Grayson Currin No one in Akron/Family is related, and no one is from Akron, Ohio. But, at the behest of Swans and Angels of Light founder Michael Gira, the band added "/Family" to its name when it followed signed to his Young God Records imprint (formerly home to Devendra Banhart, Calla and Larsen) and released its sprawling self-titled folk/noise/gospel/rock/jazz debut. A split with Angels of Light and an EP featuring collaborations with members of Do Make Say Think and jazz giants Hamid Drake and William Parker followed. Last year's Love Is Simple, their second full-length and final title for Young God, attempted to tie those ends into 11 interconnected songs and a reprise that read, appropriately, "Go out and love everyone." Pastoral beauty, blazing skree, heavy rock, studio playfulness, big solos, boom-bap beats, tight arrangements, a mindset that would embrace anything: Instead of answers or self-definition, that's what Akron/Family's records have offered most consistently. The pattern holds live. The first time I saw Akron/Family play, for instance, the band headlined for what they called their biggest crowd to date in a wide, low-roofed hall in Asheville, N.C. called the Grey Eagle Tavern. Some 500 loquacious people filled the......