Akron/Family

The hardest thing of all for a writer is to sum up something that surpasses any on-paper praise you can give it. Usually it is not a problem, it’s easy enough to accentuate any positive until what is actually good becomes great and what is actually great becomes perfect. It is needed too, this semi-conscious devotion to hyperbole.

After all, when is an album TRULY life changing? When is a performance so important that it actually does stay in your mind for weeks on end? Further, when is any form of entertainment of such a high standard that it garners true and unbridled emotion?

Almost never. You can see it documented in the hysterical screams of teenage girls within a neighbourly radius of Elvis’s gyrating hips, or younger (and indeed older) eyes flooding with tears as Bambi’s mother ceases to exist, but nowadays it seems there is nothing strong, or true, enough to warrant it. But there is an exception to every rule. Akron/Family, particularly in the live environment, are focused on and express only one emotion: absolute joy. And this is the response they receive.

Support act Phosphorescent, known to friends as Matthew Houck, is almost a polar opposite. Whilst the headliners feed off the energy of the audience and tempt them into spasms of shrieks and handclaps, Matthew is deeply introspective, greeting the audience only with nervous between-song rambles.

His five tracks warrant comparisons to Josh T Pearson’s solo material, yet where Josh uses waves of distortion to drown out his own personal war between good and evil Matthew meditates on love, both lost and found, and uses only the occasional loop to compliment his acoustic weavings.

His set is thoroughly enjoyable yet, perhaps through no fault of his own, purely incidental, for there is not a man alive who could steal Akron/Family’s thunder.

As for just under an hour and a half they offer an absolutely unique musical gumbo that renders such descriptions as transcendent, mystical and perfect lame ducks. To summarise their entire set would require Infinite Jest-like levels of detail and would be prone to thousands of tangents and contrast, but imagine if you can hair-rock guitar solos vaulting skywards, leaving behind footstomps & handclaps & assonance, from both sides of the stage barrier.

And imagine that either side of this lay folk-rock storytelling and random pockets of noise. Everything is organic and unhinged yet flows together seamlessly, from recorded favourites such as ‘Phenomena‘ and ‘Ed Is A Portal’ through to improvised passages that seem to be devoid of a start or finish.

Sounds like bullshit, right? Maybe that is the point. Truly the hardest thing of all for a writer is to sum up something that surpasses any praise you can give it.