Akron/Family: Not From Akron Or A Real Family

Thought the life of a music hack was a whole heap of giggles? This scenario might make you reconsider. Akron/Family, a tirelessly, if not heroically road-hogging outfit from the upmost echelons of cultish Americana underground, hits your locale, and you're on interviewing duties to discuss their cracking new album 'Love Is Simple' and many other topics besides. Sounds sweet, eh? Only the combo are so late to the venue they'd have been marked absent many times over in any other line of work, and our designated chat time is taken over by such slightly more pressing concerns as unloading the van, setting up the stage and soundchecking. Being bona fide gents, the band resist any sensible person's initial instincts in coping with such a time-starved situation ("Pull the interview! Pull the interview!"). Instead, they opt to devote a sizable chunk of the meagre moments they've managed to set aside for pre-show relaxation to tackling a bunch of questions they've probably encountered a gazillion times before, having practically lived on the road since forming in Brooklyn in 2003.

So there you are, feeling like a genuine, 24-carat pain in the ass, hassling hoodie-sporting drummer Dana Janssen with your tape recorder at a point when, judging by the rate he attacks the snacks assembled on the table in front of us, he'd clearly prefer to be lining his stomach in preparation for another epic outbreak of the finest cosmically frazzled space-folk exploration to emerge from the US since, well, ever. To Janssen's credit, his jovial demeanour makes your humble correspondent feel a lot less pest-esque, with only the crazed gust of possibly sarcastic laughter that occurs when the band's - from an observer's viewpoint  - inexhaustible reserves of energy enter the discussion betraying the fact this is a member of a group who doggedly refuse to recognise the concept of a holiday. Why does Akron/Family have such a bulging tour schedule when most bands prefer to venture out to the worlds venues only occasionally?

"I just like creating," Janssen says. "Playing music just feels good to us, and to share that experience with people is a really fun, beautiful thing to do. I like seeing the world. I also like the energy of being on stage night after night and feeding off the crowd's energy, having that relationship. It's addictive."

Speaking of addictions, the intense, immense, spontaneity-dripping Akron/Family live experience certainly is a habit-forming alternative to the lazy, by-numbers gigs peddled by legions of groups lacking the decency to venture beyond replicating their recorded oeuvre on stage. Put simply, Akrons don't just play; they painstakingly erase the barriers between the band and the audience, cooking up communal vibes you won't forget in a hurry. "In native cultures music was used for ceremony and celebration. That's where it stems from in the first place," Janssen explains the ancient inspirations for the band's joy-filled approach. Not that everyone's always been too appreciative of the band's open-minded approach.

"The band started when (guitarist) Seth and me lived in a loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Eventually the rest of the band moved in. It was a really bad neighbourhood. It was better to stay indoors and jam than go outside. That was our place," Janssen reminisces. "Eventually we had to get a rehearsal space. We tried to play in the apartment but neighbours would bang on the door and the walls, going 'keep it down!' After that we went through a time of playing twelve hours a day, stopping at five in the morning to catch the sunrise at Coney Island. Doing all the fun, interesting stuff you do when you're getting to know your bandmates," he concludes, breaking into a laughing fit that suggests the band's pre-fame saga doesn't consist entirely of the painstaking assembly of shimmering four-part harmonies.

Combined this sense of wide-eyed wonder with the band's unabashed air of enjoyment and fondness for extended jams, and dismissive descriptions such as 'naive' get bandied about, as if a drop of innocence was somehow a negative thing in an era thoroughly drenched in cynical cash-grabbing. Spin 'Love Is Simple', though, and any suspicions of Akron/Family subscribing to a noodle-heavy, hazy-eyed hippie era throwback template get chucked out instantly. Reigning in some of the band's more outré extremes without losing an iota of their unpredictability, and reminiscent of such sprawling masterworks as Led Zep's 'Physical Graffiti' and the Rolling Stones' 'Exile on Main Street', the band's fourth album sounds like the Akrons' sampling a gloriously generous smorgasbord of 'classic rock' styles. Which, according to Janssen, was exactly the band's intention.