AVTT/PTTN: AVTT/PTTN

Thirty Tigers/Ipecac/Ramseur Records

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An unlikely symbiosis that has reaped a handsome reward, two disparate musical giants join forces to make one handsome super giant. A stretched metaphor but an excellent result, MK Bennett remains calm.

Frank Zappa had a hell of a time being taken seriously, despite his obvious and apparent brilliance. While this was sometimes due to the actual music, it was equally as often seemingly due to a degree of suspicion. The high culture didn’t trust his baser elements or his humour and the low culture didn’t trust his intellect or his abilities, leaving him in a no-man’s land you imagine Mike Patton can easily relate to. The man’s clear dislike for being boxed in has led his career to an extent, from jazz to Italian movie soundtracks to his work with fellow musical polymath Dave Lombardo in Dead Cross. The Avett Brothers, on the other hand, are so lauded that a Broadway play based on one of their albums ran late last year; they have a film about them directed by a well-known director, AND they have been nominated for more awards than Meryl Streep’s hairdresser. Americana is a serious business; haunted country death ballads leave little room for lightness.

Not immediately obvious bedfellows, but a chance for both to see how the other half lives, they started sharing ideas and found some surprising common ground. Consider the etymology of country music as a storytelling tradition, myths and history, with humour as a mask for sincerity, then Patton, and AVTT/PTTN lie at the crossroads of that, with the interplay of styles likely a lot more blurred than appears on the surface. Consider it in the tradition of, say, Lee Hazlewood, it makes perfect sense.

First song Dark Night Of My Soul could be a missing song from Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel were it not for the darkness at its centre, which despite the orchestration and the cast of angels, still cuts through its heart like a blade. By the time the strings do arrive with some majesty, it is already a convincing trailer park murder song, a lament not yet born that would have featured on season one of True Detective. Maybe it’s that baritone, that pattern of Patton familiarity, an avoidance of hope tempered by the beauteous harmonies and the ghost sounds of something sighing in the dark. Either way, it’s mesmerizing. To Be Known is, like the rest of the album, exquisitely arranged and played, subtle inflections of piano and mandolin drift in and around a high vocal, and it just aches, the whole thing, while the echoes of the choir that permeate the record sit behind but ring, clear as a bell.

Heaven’s Breath is an upbeat rock song, an almost happy groove that should not work, an amalgamation of dampened, chugging guitars intertwined with a descending piano line and a threatening vocal which finds Patton, starting low but eventually screaming “ come back down “ before an excellent fuzzed-out guitar solo. The voices are playful, the chorus mighty, and you can definitely dance to it. It is both heavier and lighter than it seems. Too Awesome may have been a working title that turned out to be prophetic, with a hook that goes, “ Your beauty is too awesome to explain…”, while the music is the opposite of lighthearted, piano, acoustic and choir from the start, a full on 70s Laurel Canyon ballad that you can easily imagine as a wedding song, if you’re not paying attention. Think Randy Newman or Michael Nesmith.

Disappearing is also a huge thing, a ballroom full of strings and ethereal backing voices, and an extraordinary main vocal that’s occasionally buoyed by Patton’s stentorian croon, a sound instantly recognisable to those of a certain age, which isn’t to necessarily say that there’s not some cross-pollination in the mix too, moments where he disappears himself, unafraid. Hiding in plain sight. Like the rest of the album, the beauty in the sound and structure here is never in doubt. The heavenly down home aesthetic carries on through Eternal Love, a flipside to Too Awesome, where the mask drops to reveal vulnerability inside the darkened idea ( “Everyone has it, everyone knows, the dread of eternal love” ) and the fear of saying it out loud. It could be about God, etc., too. Either way it’s stunning, a centrepiece that holds and that gospel backing is sublime. At some point, you’re past caring about sincerity and just bathing in its wonder.

Perfectly illustrated by The Ox Driver’s Song, an old folk song, with Banjo and mandolin to the front, and no pressure to do anything other than make a glorious sound, which they grab by the horns. Reminiscent of Bongwater’s version of Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, it’s a big, muscular noise that travels from pastoral to electronic and back again, and for a song with such depth of history, it is an original take on the idea, dragging the plough into the 21st century. The Things I Do is an adult love song, partly based on the realities of a relationship but with an appreciation for the love too. It is another big song with thundercloud drums and upfront acoustics, a perfect arrangement and perfect vocals, just the right side of over the top, never overplaying its hand. A wedding song for the misanthropic, because hate sometimes needs love too.

Received brings us home, a reminder that The Avett Brothers do their thing so wonderfully, seemingly without ego and it is breathtaking, and the fact that they do it constantly and consistently is brought home here, with those never less than incredible harmonies ringing through your head, where they allow Patton to shed his skin and sound broken before someone, something. Quietly masterful, we come to the end with everyone telling truths, the final line that echoes, is “ It is the home of every gift of love… I’ve ever received .”

\Those expecting some art school prank or the funeral music for/of a clown will be disappointed. A collision and a collaboration, a minor classic that exists in a field of one, it is three extroverts screaming and whispering simultaneously, and it’s a delight.

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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram