By Max Jacobs | February 10th, 2011
Really truly listening to an album can be difficult task to undertake. Do you play it repeatedly for a week straight? Only listen in the car? Skip tracks constantly? Pick it up again six months later to reevaluate?
I don’t know the answers, but I do know that perhaps the best way to really get to know that album happens when you ever-so-peacefully drift off to sleep during a gentle lulling song about fireflies, and then sit bolt upright as if awoken from the grave to chaotic unrestrained noise: “HOLY SHIT, WHAT IS HAPPENING? WHERE AM I? WHAT DID I EAT?”
But perhaps this is really only the case with the new album from Akron/Family titled S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. This jolting dream-awakening sequence well describes the album, which is a hyperactive symphony of electric guitars, multipart harmonies, and general unpredictability. It sounds as if an ADD kid raised on 70s rock was let loose in the band room for an hour to weave together folk ballads and psychedelic rock songs. Please make no mistake, I mean that in the best way possible.
When the band sent their latest album to their record label in a brown cardboard box with a return address of “AK, Detroit” they also included a note:
“Birth of early adulthood ideal tribalist experimentation before belief of the best better ways. Little dreams written in communal books. These memories recovered from old coughing hard drives, spliced infinitesimally small and reconstructed into front lobe acid punk outsider emotional music spaces. A true fantasy story that ain’t no lie for direct to our fans and for the rest of ‘em. All welcome and fuck ‘em all or at least the rest of ‘em simultaneously.”
As cryptic as that may sound to you now, just listen to the album and it’ll all make a lot more sense.
