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Love Is Simple | Review
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Alex Cook | Outsideleft.com “Love, Love, Love (Everyone)†is hippy as fuckAkron/Family trajectory followed that of Banhart: they both apprenticed under Michael Gira and had turns in The Angels of Light, and they garnered critical praise for first being weird and then being brilliant. It seems when Banhart branched off from Gira, he started to fly in circles, whereas Akron/Family continues to grow stronger under his care. Love is Simple finds the wide-eyed boys in the family honing their already stunning songcraft. “Love, Love, Love (Everyone)” is hippy as fuck, seeming a caricature of “All You Need is Love” were it not for the power of their sentiment. The song is a short palate cleanser, a pass through the purifying airlock, before opening into the bouzouki-handclap campfire ritual hoedown “Ed is a Portal.” Unlike most of the groups that trapse the road The Incredible String Band paved for us 40 years ago, Akron/Family stampedes down it with terrifying force. They shift into a majestic pastoral gear in the second section, with the locomotive stomp running under the surface. You want to run the maypole to this song, and then set it on fire and howl into the night. This is......
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Love Is Simple | Revew
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Lucas Schliecher | Brainwashed.com Akron/Family's best material can be found here.Their varied musical proclivities mingle with one another effortlessly; their songwriting is stellar and their performances even better. Their most outstanding record is this one and it's a cycle dedicated to the only mystery on equal footing with death: love. The hippies never got it right. They stewed in a cesspool of confused sexuality and proclaimed (free) love the monument of and cure for the woes of human existence. To make matters worse a great deal of uninteresting music was spawned in the interest of spreading this amorous gospel and the whole mess thus became the object of many corporate attempts at recapturing an imagined liberty, attempts to which we are all now subjected in recycled form. Akron/Family scared me the second I saw the title of their newest album, but then I heard it and I felt it and I internalized it and damn it, it feels great. The group has utilized every available means to sing their ode to this great and mysterious force so I won't bother with the laundry list of instruments, studio trickery, and oddball wizardry employed to bring the whole thing to life. This......
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Love Is Simple | Review
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Curtis Schieber | Columbus Dispatch Akron/Family is truly original, the band’s stylistic and spiritual touchstones more like tributes than derivations.It would be unfair and incomplete to say that Akron/Family revived the grab-bag spirit of 1960s psychedelia with its performance in the Wexner Center’s Black Box performance space last night. The wholly contemporary indie rock band, whose members are neither family nor from Akron, displayed a musical attitude as comprehensive of punk, the recent freak folk movement, ‘80s noise bands, and the naively optimistic indie pop of bands such as the Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree. That evaluation too, would shortchange the seven-piece group, which played an often breathtaking, challengingly dynamic set that went on long past the 90-plus minutes I caught before having to leave for deadline. Akron/Family is truly original, the band’s stylistic and spiritual touchstones more like tributes than derivations.Taking them chronologically: The spirit of the Grateful Dead was echoed at more than a few points last night, though the group might shudder at the possible, mistaken association with the jam- band culture, new and old. Still, the way Akron/Family trailed off into free-form sections between and in the middle of songs could have been heard as its own version of......
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Love Is Simple | Review
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Chris DeVille | Columbus Alive Set aside that new Animal Collective record; Akron/Family has the real goods.The parallels between the two bands are many. Both spotlight a loosely-knit group of whimsical lads that moved to New York's concrete jungle to make wild-haired concoctions of folk, noise and whatever else. Both have made some of this century's most essential music. And both continue to step consciously toward pop on their new releases while maintaining an essential weirdness that makes using the word "pop" kind of laughable. But where the Animals' Strawberry Jam gets bogged down in its own stickiness, Akron/Family's new Love is Simple is vibrant and exploratory and explosive. After a shockingly straightforward introductory track, "Ed Is a Portal" plays like a tribal victory lap, with bobbing guitar and vocal chants ripped from some ancient Native American peoples—or at least the Atlanta Braves. The rest of the record continues developing the band's traditions, with doe-eyed ballads, backwoods porch songs, a cappella choirs and furious feedback experiments competing for space, sometimes on the same track. (Try "There's So Many Colors" on for size.) The album is an invigorating extension of last year's Meek Warrior and a promising sign for Friday's show at the......
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Love Is Simple | Review
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Justin Scott | Georgetown Voiceexciting and livelyAkron/Family burst onto the music scene in 2005 with their promising self-titled debut and a fantastic split EP with the Angels of Light. With 2006’s Meek Warrior, however, they seemed to run out of energy even as they piled on the ideas. Thankfully, Love is Simple is exciting and lively, and its fusion of straightforward rock, tribal freak-outs and dense soundscapes makes it Akron/Family’s best release yet. Love is Simple isn’t a concept album per se, but it has a consistent feel and theme—love—that does wonders for its effectiveness. Among the shorter songs, “Don’t Be Afraid, You’re Already Dead” and “Phenomena” are standouts. Both exercise restraint and emphasize melody until their fantastic Neil Young-esque guitar climaxes. Of the longer songs, “Ed Is A Portal” and “There’s So Many Colors” are noteworthy. Both contain some of Akron/Family’s best tribal freak outs, perhaps best described as a mixture of campfire harmonies and free jazz via bizarre vocal chants, handclaps and sparse acoustic guitars.Aside from one unnecessary brief drum-machine passage at the end of “Ed Is A Portal,” the arrangements are fresh and organic in a way most releases today are not. And like Young’s albums Tonight’s the......