Whether you know it or not, 2007 is the Year of the Avett Brothers.
The trio from Concord, North Carolina, released their fourth and most
ambitious studio album, Emotionalism, in May; it debuted at
number one on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and garnered
rave reviews. One week later, they appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Since January, they’ve toured almost 10,000
miles, crisscrossing the country twice, earning frequent-flyer miles
with longtime fans and picking up new followers with every show. The
band—brothers Scott and Seth Avett, abetted by Bob Crawford on
upright bass—have expanded in every possible way.
The one constraint the Avett Brothers initially abided, that
launched them on the upward trajectory that’s still rising as you read
this, is playing Appalachian-style music as an acoustic trio. In other
words, they’re a bluegrass band. The raw-throated, barefooted,
front-porch ease of their music, the guilelessness of it all, has, up
until now, been their biggest selling point.
But with Emotionalism, all that’s been tossed aside to
reveal a band that’s a lot more neurotic, sophisticated, and pop
oriented than they first let on. “Bluegrass” no longer cuts it as a
descriptor. The makeover seems like a headfake, one that might confuse
casual fans and piss off the serious ones. But according to singer,
banjo player, and kick-drummer Scott Avett, the band always had bigger
things in mind than the front porch.
“The job of maintaining tradition or some authenticity, we’ve handed
that off to the people that are good at it,” says Avett. “That’s just
not our interest or our goal. We might’ve at one time thought we were
gonna be tradition carriers, but we pretty much walked away from that.
We had the ambitions from the start.”
Those ambitions are there in the Avetts’ earlier material. If you
listen closely, you can hear a polished pop group and a raucous rock
band hiding beneath their strummy, harmonized exterior. “Talk on
Indolence,” the opening salvo on their 2006 breakout, Four Thieves
Gone, opens with a sort of punk-rock rap before settling into a
hard-sung cacophony of anxiety. “I’m a little nervous/about what you
might think/when you see me in my swimming trunks,” Seth Avett sings.
And then an electric guitar comes in, fuzzy and distorted, to close the
song.
Those ambitions were there in Nemo, the rock band the brothers
started almost a decade ago, before settling down with acoustic
instruments. They continue in the side project Oh What a Nightmare, a
sort-of roots metal band that harks back to the brothers’ Southern
hesher history.
“A band like Oh What a Nightmare, it’s most definitely a release,”
Avett says. “We walked immediately away from the electric setup [of
Nemo] to what we have now. We were playing with guys with two full
guitar stacks, a big bass rig, a full drum kit—it was very loud.
And we just cut that off and were done with it, but we’re looking
forward to doing it again. Right now with the Avett Brothers, we’re
diving into so many other types of expression with other instruments,
and some electric here and there, and it kind of satisfies that
appetite.”
So they settled on whatever it is they do
now—acoustic-electric modern-traditional grab-bag indie-pop
miscellany. Bluegrass was the shortcut to their initial audience, and
they appreciate the form, but it isn’t what the Avetts are. Shaggy
haired, bearded, hailing from rural Cackalacky—they certainly
look the part. But purists couldn’t handle their refusal to stay within
its bounds. They weren’t old-timey enough.
“You get guys coming out thinking it’s gonna be a five-piece
bluegrass band with a couple brothers in it,” Avett says. “That really
served us wrong.”
By definition, pop and folk are opposed: Pop is for consumption, for
entertainment, while folk attempts to perpetuate indigenous culture.
But the Avetts blur that definition. They’re barreling right down the
middle, intent on giving as much as they get.
“We talk about that a lot,” Avett says of the band’s intentions. “We
didn’t in the beginning, when we were making and developing this, we
just did what came natural and tried to maintain that. We got lucky
that we’ve fallen into this groove. I don’t think there’s any evidence
that we’re heading one way or another.”
And so it goes—the Avett Brothers keep explaining themselves
one brilliant record and one sweat-drenched, string-busting,
crowd-surfing show at a time. 