Akron/Family
Meek Warrior
Release Date: Oct 3, 2006
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Young God
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Meek Warrior from Amazon
Album Review: Meek Warrior by Akron/Family
Excellent, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
The most beautiful thing about the Akron/Family, this collective quartet of New York musicians who record for Michael Gira's Young God label, is that they are virtually unclassifiable. Is it rock? Post-rock? Acid folk? Freak folk? Free improvisation? Ultimately, who cares what it is, that it is is what matters most, and that is displayed prominently on this seven-cut "special album" (according to Gira). It's over 35 minutes, and includes the nine-plus-minute opus "Blessing Force" that moves from silence to rock-out mantra, to chant to intricate polyrhythmic interplay to free-form, improv, wig city back to guitar, bass, drums zone-out to skronk.
Opinion: Excellent
If rock is a school, the four members of Akron/Family are its most dramatic, most academically gifted spaz-outs. They are fluent in the vocabularies of rock, folk, soul and jazz, and can ask for directions in punk and metal. And, as they prove on “Lightning Bolt of Compassion,” they don’t even have to sing their lyrics in English. Let it never be said that they haven’t been fortunate.
'Meek Warrior'
is available now