A while ago my friend was all “oh Akron Family, yeah…they’re SO such-and-such” and played me some of Love Is Simple. We were driving around on a beautiful day and it sounded terrific and totally weird — all this super euphoria, big guitar and mystical shaman nonsense — all of which can be very likable in the right quantities. I was curious, and got more curious when I asked around and people responded with this “oh-shit-you-don’t-know-about-this?” reverence, saying things like “…its ’60s Grateful Dead, Neil Young and math rock…” or “…killed it at Coachella…” or “…singer quit the band, joined a Buddhist monastery…” I could forgive the punctuation in their name and the fact that they’re not actually from Akron, Ohio; at that point it was like “nice to meet you, new favorite band.” This is also what I was thinking when I skipped dinner and rushed to the club (since, naturally, a band with this cache of utter, ocean-deep awesomeness would most certainly sell out the rinky dink Rickshaw Stop). I call my friend Muhammad to take pictures. He was kind enough to ditch his gig photographing the Breeders to join me for what promised to a two-set consciousness-expanding rock odyssey from the Akron/Family.

(photos by Muhammad Asranur)

9:01 — Drummer Dana Janssen appears on stage sporting some kind of African headband decorated with shells that looks kinda like a belt that a girl at the Horde Festival might wear. On its own, this gesture is only somewhat off-putting. Accompanied by the Michael Jordan sweatband guitarist Seth Olinsky is wearing and the feathered headdress/hat that’s on amp, it seems as if they’re modeling the goods of a Paul Simon-operated outlet of Claire’s. But, its early and at this point I’m with it — I mean, what kind of jerk judges people on such things? Take the girl who was standing next to me in a sideways ponytail, leg warmers and glasses that look like the lady on “The Golden Girls” — she’s probably totally awesome.

9:18 — Meric Long, the guy from The Dodos who got mad at me once when I wrote about him showcasing for Dave Matthew’s label, is playing with the band on second guitar. He puts it down for a second to play pocket trumpet. It seems like he doesn’t really know the words to the songs.

9:21 — The bass player, Miles Seaton, commands the audience to bounce up and down and snap their fingers along to the beat. My friend leans over and says, “This is what it feels like when you had to square dance in middle school gym class.”

9:38 — They sing a new song with the lyric “One silly bear said to the other silly bear, ‘Where do you get your honey so sweet?’” The later silly bear eventually answers the first silly bear — the sweet honey comes from an ancient forest, behind a giant flower. Of course it does.

9:48 — It’s not until Olinsky sings “Wherever there is laughing, dancing and honey, I will be there” that I become filled with a crippling despair. It reminds me of this time I went to a Crate and Barrel with my mom and dad and all these engaged couples were walking around the store with laser guns, scanning the UPCs of shit that they wanted people to buy them for their wedding. Shortly after, they (the band, not the couples) conclude the first set.

10:28 — The second set begins with stuff from Love Is Simple, played one-into-the-next with long intros and lots of jamming. Surely, the marijuana will take hold and this will be better. Wrong. They pass around a Native American frame drum and yelping falsetto nonsense. One summer as a teenager I got fooled into going to Christian summer camp and someone spoke in tongues (for the record I still suspect it was not actually the Holy Sprit) and it was like that. At one point Olinsky is screeching on a penny whistle and clapping together two sets of Turkish finger cymbals. A really tall woman walks into the room wearing full-on spandex and a bike helmet. It seems that I might be being “put on.”

I retire to the back of the room. Standing there, watching the crowd dance like they were about to explode into tarragon-scented butterfly semen, I’m feeling somewhat left out of it, thinking “What kind of sourpuss jerk would have a problem with these obviously sincere fellows? Why do I hate this?” But here’s why: the entirety of the scene– the big tie died flag behind the stage, the African head gear, the penny whistle, the prog/psyche and pan-ethnic musical bla bla that seems so perfectly calibrated for ultimate Pitchfork boner — makes the Akron/Family seem less like consciousness expanders and more like bumbling frauds: borrowing generously from a grab bag of other people’s meaningful stuff without much consideration of what any of it means. Worse, it seems like they’re just borrowing it to laugh about how everything is meaningless. A little Afropop here and cartoon-hour Native American war whoop there, a jokey hip hop beat here and big Creedence riff there, shit, even the tied died flag — it’s all flaunted with such dank smelling hippie earnestness that it overpowers the stink of irony. Is a badass Neil Young riff actually sweet, or is it ironic? (Same question for the mustache on Dodo #2). If the point here is to give a slobbering French kiss to the meaninglessness and throw a bizarre love-in/dance party — which maybe I coulda gathered when they repeatedly sing “no point exists” on “There’s So Many Colors” — I’m starting to feel dude’s decision to leave the silly bears and run off to the Buddhist monastery.

More pictures from the show will be up at Muhammad’s flicker account. Sorry about the Breeders.