Akron/Family: "River"

Because music is maybe 75% fantasy/wish-fulfillment, what you choose to listen to might end up, unfortunately, saying a lot about who you are. In the case of Akron/Family, what they project implies who they are almost immediately, and who they are, I imagine, has a lot to do with daydreaming, about no longer wearing a shirt and quitting my job to just play music with some bros in a warm garage, hanging out every night in the field out back so that maybe in a warbly fuzz I can tell some smart honey, “you and I and a flame makes three.” Of course, what a band projects on the surface is much different from what either of us (creators and audience; bros and not-bros) is actually about; I don’t even really like that daydream. Mostly it’s just less painful than the rich aura of real Memory that “River,” from forth-coming Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, summons. Over that ever-popular Afro-something picked guitar (less repressed and nervous than the speedy, trebly Vampire Weekend variation), percussion evokes insects then blends seamlessly into a hopping groove. Whistling, horns, and friendly shouts filter Life into the peripheral, using the pristine production and goosebump-y reverb as a blank canvas.

But the music, as strong as it is, doesn’t have such a clear-headed, subtly sensual grasp on the Poetic Expression Of The Moment as the lyrics do:

And you are not glassy bay to me
And you are not glassy bay to me
Though my tired fleet abides in your gentle breeze
And you are now vast and open sea
And my mind travels you endlessly
And you beckon, toss and toss and swallow me

I mean, fuck my daydreams. The scary-real wish that “River” truly fulfills for me is to make every perfect moment I have ever experienced completely revisitable. It’s a hippy-groove feat that the Fam may have never made so ostensibly inhabitable before, always championing the communal bliss of sitting in a circle and making noise of the moment but finally hitting upon the formula that allows all that to not seem so trite, horns and rhythmic lead guitar underlining all the beautiful things that I fucked up or forgot entirely.