The Avett Brothers
I and Love and You
Sony Records
http://www.theavettbrothers.com/
North Carolina’s The Avett Brothers have always had a few too many ideas for their own good. The band’s 6th studio album, I and Love and You, fits into the lose framework of Americana, but within those confines the brothers Avett are all over the place. The most successful tunes find a mood and a style and stick with it, embracing the ebb and flow those restrictions allow. The worst offenders come off as musical polygamy, wedded to too many good ideas.
The album kicks off with four of the most thoroughly wrought cuts on the album. The title track leads things off on plaintive piano pulses and road-weary laments before erupting into a rafter-rattling chorus bolstered by an organ surge. “January Wedding” follows it up with tightly woven banjo-guitar interplay carrying nearly saccharine (yet effective) sentiments about a girl one of the brothers is to marry. Both “Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise” and “And it Spread” are Cinemascope Americana–big, sweeping, poetic, with just enough little touches to keep them from being so bloated they don’t move you.
It’s the album’s midsection that poses the biggest problems. “The Perfect Space” wants to be a touching testament to true friendship, but just past the halfway point the piano shifts drastically from heart-felt to honky-tonk and the sweeping balladry drops out in favor of high energy shouts. Neither section is bad or wrong, but the way they interact is like oil and water. There’s also “Laundry Room,” a soulful diddy that breaks into a hoedown at the four-minute mark for reasons I don’t think even the Avetts could explain.
It’s the album’s midsection that poses the biggest problems. “The Perfect Space” wants to be a touching testament to true friendship, but just past the halfway point the piano shifts drastically from heart-felt to honky-tonk and the sweeping balladry drops out in favor of high energy shouts. Neither section is bad or wrong, but the way they interact is like oil and water. There’s also “Laundry Room,” a soulful diddy that breaks into a hoedown at the four-minute mark for reasons I don’t think even the Avetts could explain.
William Faulkner once said “kill your darlings.” These words should be pinned up in the tour bus when The Avett Brothers ride through town on October 20th to play The Englert Theater.
