Artists: Akron/Family
Venue: Bowery Ballroom, NYC, NY
Date: September 26, 2007
Yet another brilliant band that I was lucky enough to have witnessed at that amazing Katrina Benefit so many years ago, the Akron/Family were both similar and very different from my hazy memories of that night. Similar in their hug-your-fellow-man-and-sing-along-with-us hippie-esque warm-spiritedness and flashes of freak-folkish electric and rhythmic audio assaults, but dissimilar in physical appearance and number (7 > 4!), the details didn’t really matter. The music did, and does, for this is an inventive band with a lot of soul and even more energy than I remembered. The tribal drums are what most struck me this time, and again I came away with the weird image of a religious cult singing the praises of the Almighty in tongues, decrying nothing but filled only with love for all and a strong curiosity about the infinite possibilities in the world for all sorts of ideas and sounds and people that is notable absent in most other religious groups. Long live the cult of the family!
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