Akron/Family - Love Is Simple

ALUYES (Arbitrary Lend Us Your Ears Score): 96%

Pros:

• thematically strong, cohesive
• folk style roots progressive rock sound
• extremely rewarding album (if you bring yourself to it)

Cons:

• real real weird (if that's a problem)
  
• difficult as background music (you can't not listen to this)
  

When I play Akron/Family for people, I always put on "Ed is a Portal", and ask them how much fun they think it would've been to help record the track. I do this to eliminate the typical mindset we put ourselves in when listening to new music, judging it by some nebulous criterion the content of which we may not even be aware.

"Ed is a Portal" is the second track from Akron/Family's second album "Love is Simple", and it goes something like this:

A chorus of at least 15 people are singing what sounds like a native american/tribal chant, with a few different simultaneous vocalizations, driven initially by shaken instruments and tambourines. Strings pick up under the voices: a guitar, a banjo. The lead male chanters (the actual four members of Akron/Family) sing out "Ed is a portal... Ed is a portal... and damned if we don't try!" As they finish, the tambourine beat erupts into full drums.

The multi-vocal chanting alternates with a single vocalist slinging paragraphs of cosmic psychedelic lyricry for a cycle or two before all sound is extinguished but a slow clapped beat and a a chant that's almost a yell: "Liquidating hydrogen! Balloons in relief; the mountains are steep!"

At this point, the song immediately downshifts to a single acoustic guitar, perfectly processed, noodling sweetly through a folk melody. A single male vocalist starts singing a fairly coherent verse; the track sounds, if just for a moment, like the Grateful Dead. But inevitably the snare kicks back in, a glockenspiel, a bit of psychedelic synth, and the lyrics get crazier and crazier, and suddenly there's a sample of a man delivering a lecture on primordial mankind.

Without warning it's just the four male vocalists again, chanting to a great hollering crescendo "To all of the places that I have known!" And as the crescendo breaks, the multi-vocal chanting from the first part of the song returns full force. The song sweeps through another round of vocals and horn before ending with one final triumphant "Ed is a Portal."

Only it doesn't. There's still fourty-four seconds of track. A beat of silence, then a drum machine beat building to a single, harmonized, heavily processed quatrain with a slight echo.

"The immortals gently awaken/
all possibilities open unto one another/
and brothers and sisters begin/
to see truly through strata."

The drum beat continues, with the addition of a fire alarm/klaxon/car alarm syncopation for another seven or so seconds, and then silence.

Ok, so I'll grant you Akron/Family is weird, and sometimes when people listen to this it's just too much for them, it's too different. But the solid majority of people I've played this for agree, in this case, different is awesome.

Love is Simple isn't all like "Ed is a Portal". The album consists, in my mind, of two different kinds of songs. The first kind are very simple; the melodies are classic, the instrumentation traditional, the message universally and explicitly about the importance and simplicity of loving your fellow man. The first and last songs on the album belong to this classification, as well as the track that includes the album title as a refrain, called "Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead".

Songs like "Ed is a Portal" belong to the other category. These songs are erratic, incredibly complex, often non-linear, occasionally crowded by overwhelming instrumentation, occasionally devolving into tribal drums and improvised organic mass vocalization. These songs run the gamut in terms of lyricism and instrumentation, from "I've Got Some Friends", which is like a Wordsworth poem but much more rambunctious, to "There's So Many Colors", which starts out as a droning, downtuned chant which transitions into soulful, freeform Hendrix-style guitar, and slips briefly into some light folk vocalization before revealing itself at the end as heavy, dynamic, unstoppable rock.

A song unique on the album is "Pony's O.G.", in that it breaches both categories. There are only eight lines in the lyrics, but the song is primarily a beautiful harmonized melodic vocalization. Mid-way through, it's broken by some alien sounding percussion and a persistant horn, which builds in instrumentation until it sounds like a possessed jazz quartet, which flails itself about frenetically before it looses energy and the initial vocalization rises soothingly from under it.

The song itself is an exercise in contrast: the simple and the complex, the delicate and the chaotic, one simple notion against everything else in the universe, which is why it serves almost as an allegory for the album itself. Love itself is presented as the only stable, trustworthy, pure force amid the storm of our lives. Idealistic, certainly, but refreshing.

Simply put, I love Love is Simple. Musically, it is difficult to label, but it's clean, direct, and intentioned even when it seems spontaneous and organic. There's a heavy folk influence, which I love, moments of unrestrained rock and roll, blues, and a liberal dose of psychedelia. It's not an easy album at times, it certainly pushes the boundaries of traditional musical structure, but if you can handle some strangeness, Love is Simple does not stop satisfying.


Akron/Family - Ed Is A Portal

Phosphorescent - Pride

It was cold outside when I first heard Matthew Houck sing. I was in an enormous wooden house with about a dozen other young adults, most of them talented musicians, the rest of us avid listeners. Though we were there ostensibly for the purpose of hanging out while those of us in a folk band rehearsed for a show, the natural proclivity of teenagers to drink and smoke and laugh and argue and carouse had rather derailed the rehearsal plan. Amid djembe drumming and banjo noodling, a particularly emaciated guitarist withdrew from an enormous binder one CD. “Hey y’all cut that out and listen to this.” The album was Pride, the (then) recently released LP by freak-folk/country artist Matthew Houck, who has released his last three LP’s under the moniker Phosphorescent. Houck released a Willie Nelson tribute album entitled To Willie just this month, but Pride remains the most recent original work, so I figured I’d best review that instead.

Pride is an extremely cohesive album, in keeping with Houck’s previous work. The album feels like it was cut inside of a small, cozy house well outside of Atlanta, in early mornings and late evenings, through the bleary glory of a hungover sunrise, the gentle haze of good bourbon. The reason for this is evident; that’s how it happened. Houck plays every instrument on the album, and his familiarity shows, but he’s not the only musician who recorded on the album, preferring to recruit a friend here or there. Despite this, Pride is the kind of album with a mood and tone so precise and unique that it could only have come from one artist.

Pride, like almost all of Houck’s work, has been incredibly well received critically, but enjoys less commercial success. But Phosphorescent is the real deal; Houck puts every ounce of himself into this music, and it shows. Thousands of sounds, not a one out of place. If you’re a fan of folk looking for something a little different, or if you’re an Animal Collective returning to folk roots, Phosphorescent is a phenomenal choice, and Pride specifically is certainly worth the buy if you can find it.

Lo-fi, organic, and melancholy to the point of occasional sorrow, Pride takes traditional folk, blues, and ballad structure, combines it with Houck’s simple, compelling songwriting, and then either pursues it classically, or turns it on its head entirely. However, even the tracks in which Houck adheres to traditional form, such as the ballad “my dove, my dove, my lamb,” are composed in an extremely deliberate and complex way, the acoustic and slide guitars sliding over and under a harmonica and an incredibly unobtrusive accordion, punctuated by some sort of maraca of shaker. Coupled with a soft, celestial human choir and the desperate understatement of Houck’s singing, the track is drenched with the same sublime effect the rest of the album can proudly claim.

But not every track is traditionalist. “At death, a proclamation” is simultaneously dark and triumphant, haunting and rousing; short, but perhaps the strongest track on the album. Houck managed this by grounding and driving the song, otherwise an ethereal near-psychedelic musing on death, by recording it over a chance on-site recording of a high school drumline, turning the track into a brief but brilliant anthem with an aggression and a spirit to it that is unmatched by any other track.

Striking a balance between the two is “A Picture of Our Torn-Up Praise,” the album’s opener, and the most upbeat track on the album, which isn’t saying much, considering that despite that fact, the tone it manages to strike resides somewhere between the realms of wistful, hopeful, and whimsical. Houck’s voice is such an instrument in and of itself that his lyrics are at some points obfuscated by his musicality. It’s a common problem on the album, but an entirely forgivable one, because the lyrics, while poetic (I won't be the one when all is said and all is done/ I won't be breathing like you breathe into the light of day/ I'll be in the yard still taking pictures in the dark/ of all our torn up praise), aren’t what’s really important here. The essence of this song, and of the album, lies in the sound, in a way exemplified by the final track, the title track, “Pride”.

“Pride” is an instrumental track that can actually be seen as the outro of the penultimate track, a soft ballad with hard lyrics called “cocaine lights”, if an outro is what you would call a six minute aural soundscape. It carries the basic melody over from the previous track in the form of Houck’s voice layered dozens and dozens of times, each instance meandering in its own slightly different direction, permutating and evolving as the song progresses. The first time I heard it in that big wooden house, and every time since, the track paints a vivid picture of a savanna at night. Maracas hiss like rattlesnakes, and yelps like dogs or jackals sound in the distance, as Houck’s voice shimmers above it all like an aurora borealis, phosphorescent.



"A Picture Of Our Torn-Up Praise"



"at death, a proclamation"


"Wolves"