Akron/Family @ The Knitting Factory, February 17
Words: Jeffrey Greenblatt
Images: Jeremy Gordon
Last Thursday night, the sounds permeating the air at the Knitting Factory’s new outpost in Williamsburg were full of long improvised jams, yet you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the room discussing Trey Anastasio’s impending solo tour or dissecting Umphrey’s McGee’s setlist from the night before. This night belonged to a completely different breed of “jamband,” as the Akron/Family put its brand of Cosmic American music on display, to a sold out crowd, that enthusiastically danced with abandon during the Brooklyn & Portland-based act’s hour and a half-plus tour opening show.
Declaring that they had lost a coin-toss with the universe, the three-piece act, whose music straddles the line between Animal Collective’s knob turning psychedelic weirdness and the Grateful Dead’s early ’60s primordial acid-drenched material, opened the night with an impromptu acapella cover of the chorus of Marvin Gaye & Tami Terrell’s Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing. With the debt paid to the music gods, the band used the majority of the night to showcase material from the highly recommended new studio album S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT.
READ ON for more on the night and a full photo gallery…
The beginning of the year is traditionally slow for new music, but over the last few weeks things have been picking up with a number of quality releases giving us
Technically speaking, Akron/Family are a jamband: they look like hippies, cite early Grateful Dead as an influence and like to play long, spacey, psychedelic jams. That said, we bet the band
