Family Beards
* Akron/Family: Awake (3.5 mb) | Moment (7.5 mb) | Future Myth (11.5 mb)
From Akron/Family & Angels Of Light : Young God Records : YG30
For awhile now, the Akron/Family has been one of my favorite bands. I first heard about them because they were the current backing band for Michael Gira’s Angels of Light (look here) project. I loved the sounds and sonorities they brought to the project.
But hearing their group work was a revelation to me. Though they are often lumped in with the “New Weird America” movement (they veer easily from free noise freakouts to delicate folk guitar to ragged 4 part harmony vocal chants) they seem to be approaching music much differently than the other groups and are much more rock ‘n’ roll based.
Akron/Family are four extremely nice, sincere and well-mannered young men from rural America who came to NYC (in 2002) to make music, hoping to find a thread of real magic still winding through this city’s music scene. They certainly did just that, but they did it by retreating into a tiny Brooklyn apartment, where they made their own world instead, in complete and stubborn isolation. They proceeded (while simultaneously growing alarmingly long beards and developing a playful but hermetic quasi-religious/sonic worldview/creed known as “AK” or sometimes “AK-AK”) to make several albums worth of recordings on crude home equipment – the material compulsively chopped, spliced, and orchestrated into fractal jewels of song and schismatically opposed atmospheres.
(from the website)
I finally got a chance to see them play the other day and it was totally great. They have an infectiously fun characteristic to their music and actually have senses of humor that seem to be sorely lacking in most other bands of the genre. And while they sometimes veered a little too much into aimless jamming territory, there were able to pull it off simply because you could see their joy and commitment and belief in what they were doing.
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