Last year, in the middle of Akron/Family’s show at the Tractor
Tavern, the four band members stepped down from the stage,
infiltrated the audience with hand drums, and persuaded a room of
self-conscious indie rockers to chant, “The myriad colored lights of
love and space!”
What started off as a night of quiet strumming had turned into two
hours of blasted free jazz, dark metal dirges, and extended Zappa-esque
guitar solos. By the end of the evening, much of the tight-pantsed
audience had left. Only a few stragglers stuck around to see the band’s
version of “I Know You Rider,” a song made famous by the Grateful
Dead.
Five years ago, Akron/Family’s giddy, earnest-as-a-schoolboy
genre-hop rock would’ve gotten them pegged as a jam band, a pejorative
from which there is no redeeming. These days, like other clans of
bearded, rural-born musicians, Akron/Family—who hail from
Pennsylvania and have never been to Ohio—earn the fortunate if
vague tag of “freak folk.”
The distinction is purely semantic. The way they play
music—and the way they talk about it—is straight out of
Reed College circa 1998.
“The indie music community too often stands around with their hands
in their pockets or their arms crossed, making silent aesthetic
judgments and forgetting how much letting go and dancing can lift the
human spirit, the same way it has for thousands of years,” says Seth
Olinsky, guitarist and vocalist in Akron/Family.
The band don’t shy away from making general statements about “the
indie community” or from using the j word, though there’s no
doubt they benefit from its disuse. Pitchfork—who favored the
“unmitigated hippie gaiety” on Akron/Family’s just-released Love Is
Simple—wouldn’t deign to even sneer at a jam
band.
It’s the band’s association with DIY guru Michael Gira, who released
Love Is Simple on his Young God Records as well as Devendra
Banhart’s two early albums, that put them in safe, solid freak-folk
territory. True, a certain folkiness has always pervaded Akron/Family’s
music—acoustic guitars, intimate songwriting, campfire harmonies,
songs with lyrics suggesting that listeners “go out and love, love,
love everyone.” But then folky segues to freaky: They’ve constructed
their own semiserious religious philosophy called
Ak Ak (which
they prefer not to talk about), they hold interband yogi-style
beard-growing contests, they sing lyrics like, “In the shadow you gave
me a rainbow/it filled the space/the space of my mind.”
Love Is Simple is the first album to reveal Akron/Family as
a next-generation jam band, improvisational and malleable in ways only
hinted at previously. The song “Ed Is a Portal” directly reinvents the
eight-minute epics of Phish, with unexpected genre switching, wandering
jams, and goofy New Age lyrics.
“Improvising music with friends has been a huge part of my life
since I was 13 or 14, and I feel like it has informed not only my
musical view but who I am,” Olinsky says. “As a kid, I was definitely
influenced by a wide range of jam bands. I would be happy to be seen as
carrying on even the tiniest bit of the Grateful Dead’s tradition.”
Like many who graduated from the jam-band generation, Olinsky looks
back on that culture with mild contempt, calling it “mid-’90s flaccid
noodling music.” Yet the emphasis Akron/Family put on their live shows,
the motivation to relentlessly tour the world—they’ve played
Seattle three times in 19 months—comes directly out of that
culture. Most of the bands in the freak-folk scene are in the same
lineage: Animal Collective have stated that they wish that one day “the
parking lot of an Animal Collective Show will feel like the parking lot
at a Grateful Dead show,” and Brightblack Morning Light encourage
Gaia-centric community by asking fans to bring crystals to their
concerts.
“We want our music to be more about music, more about humans
connecting and even lifting spirits by playing music for other people,”
Olinsky says. “The jam-band audience is more appreciative of that,
than, say, the indie-rock crowd.”
Though for all appearances, those crowds are now one and the
same—at least when Akron/Family come through town. Whether the
band signal a turning point in perception or a redefinition of
terminology is irrelevant when your eyes are closed and you’re swaying
in the middle of a packed crowd chanting, “Love is simple.”
Says Olinsky: “It’s a great time for a jam band to be misinterpreted
as cool.”