Dead Oceans

It’s not easy to wrap one’s head around Akron/Family’s newest release. It’s a concept record – allegedly a pastiche of sounds pulled from a long-lost trove of the group’s earliest recordings and repurposed through its current incarnation. It’s the sequel to – or the remake of – the group’s self-titled debut, recorded in the flank of an erupting volcano or in the wreckage of Detroit. The song’s video features the trio standing still in a backward-moving New York cityscape while subtitles declare that the band is in Japan. This doesn’t feel like a collection of songs as much as it feels like a long suite of compositions. Sure, at times the psychotechnowizardry summons U2 or The Cure – but also summons rain, static, Funkadelic, water boiling over flame, perhaps a gamelan, a Japanese flute, John Lennon and a saxophone. There are bits here and there that remind one of Akron cohorts Bon Iver or Megafaun, or The Dodos and the West Coast’s modern psychedelic sounds – as if the bands are all talking to each other now. It’s all infused through Akrons’ own increasingly-electro tribalism, squealy-dry twin guitar leads and double bass, dude-gang hollers and occasional crystalline pop. It’s headfuckery, of course. The Akron/Family is telling its own story.