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Album Reviews
Album review: Akron/Family – S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT (Dead Oceans)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 17 February 2011
Akron/Family play spaced-out, woozy, country-fried psych rock. That’s what they do. And on ‘S/T II’ they offer up some suitably odd moments of sublime American wilderness music.
Campfire drums and bird song mix with subaqueous basslines and Animal Collective rip-off semi-ecstatic chants (on ‘Island’). Delicate chords and doo-wop harmonies mingle with face-melting guitar leads (‘A AAA O A WAY’). And Hans Zimmer-esque glockenspiel road movie melodies and creamy vocals share a bottle of late night beer with endless summers pounding out schaffel-stomps on ‘Light Emerges’.
‘S/T II’ is an odd thing: in its attempt at sounding like an effortless late afternoon wander through a meadow, it comes across as an exercise in creating the mood, rather than inhabiting it. The aforementioned very good songs are lumped in with a series of go nowhere tracks that clearly desperately want to live up to the “cosmic” word in the title, but the attempt at conveying joy and a sense of naïve awe at the natural world in the vocals and lyrics comes across as trite. And the overstuffed mix is cloying at times.
Though in Akron/Family’s defence, this isn’t music intended for overcast English Februarys. Perhaps an afternoon by a lake in Portland, Oregon, with a flowing-haired-floral-dressed babe, would wipe out any reservations I had about the authenticity of the band’s intentions. JAB
Physical release: 14 Mar