Love is Simple
Akron/Family
Score:80
Reviewer: Justin Pearsall
Label: Young God Records (USA & UK), Spunk (Australia)
Reviewed: Sep 3rd '07, Released:2007
Akron/Family exist in their own musical sphere, making any attempts at universal categorisation futile. It is this individuality, their chameleon quality, which lead to a slew of critical praise for the band’s live performances and a growing awareness to their three recordings, the highlight of these being 2006’s transitory Meek Warrior– a record existing somewhere between prog-rock and folk. While Meek Warrior won the band new fans, the very qualities attracting attention to the album, its genre-hopping and loose, live sounding performances, were the attributes that polarised others and ultimately made the album fascinating, but unremarkable.
Such a polarisation makes the follow up to Meek Warrior the musical equivalent of bowling’s seven-ten split. Should the band simplify and expand on the hooks of Meek Warrior? Or continue in more experimental directions? Somehow Love Is Simple achieves both, thickening the melodic and harmonic element speckled throughout its predecessor, providing tighter, crisper performances and arrangements, while attaining that ‘screw you’ to pigeonholing that defines the band as special in the first place.
The album is an extended portrayal of the daring and melodious qualities that makes ‘classic rock’ so important. Opening with the album’s bookend track ‘Love, Love, Love (Everyone)’, our first exposure to Love Is Simple is a calculated, yet unpretentious, reappraisal of Lennon’s ‘All You Need is Love’; the song’s chorus echoing The Beatles’ pop ethos, demonstrating the album’s love of old fashioned hooks.
Before the release of Love Is Simple it would have been fair to say Akron/Family sounded like nothing heard before. But being unique does not always equate to artistic success, and on Meek Warrior Akron/Family were sometimes a little too heavy-handed in asserting their own singularity, obfuscating the album’s true intentions.
Asides from a few slight transgressions the same cannot be said about Love Is Simple. It is a far more focused and thorough realisation of Akron/Family’s heretofore only hinted-at potential. ‘Family’ member Seth Olinksy may have been right when he said that the best may still be yet to come for his band, but in the meantime, Love Is Simple is frighteningly developed.
