AKRON/FAMILY at Sonic Boom, Friday, July 26. Rating: NNN
Few bands are simultaneously as heavy and as hippie as folk-noise trio Akron/Family, who dropped into Toronto for an in-store at Sonic Boom Friday evening, prior to their appearance at Guelph’s Hillside fest on Saturday. The band has surely played all kinds of venues (in fact, this was a return visit to Sonic Boom) but as they tweaked their sound in front of a gathering crowd, frontmen Seth Olinsky and Miles Seaton joked that this isn’t their usual way of doing things – they usually sound check.
Friday’s performance felt intimate and improvised, as Olinsky and Seaton, along with drummer Dana Janssen and multi-instrumentalist M. Geddes Gengras rocked out in front of Marshall stacks – yeah, Marshall stacks! The band was loud not ear-splittingly loud, but involuntarily dancing-about, swaying, head-banging loud. Akron/Family may as well drop the folk label for the time being. Touring their recent album, Sub Verses, their set was tribal, psychedelic, heavy and percussive, with drum-only segues that sometimes saw all four guys gathered around the kit layering rhythms.
Hearing the lyrics over the guitar feedback was at times a challenge, but lyrics weren’t really the point: Akron/Family’s vocals often sound like incantations. At one point they got the crowd repeating nonsensical vowels back to them and clapping along.
