I and Love and This 5 Out of 5 Stars
I was fortunate enough to see The Avett Brothers at The 50th Newport Folk Festival, and they were the new find of the year for me there. I picked up Emotionalism
and was eager to hear the songs that the brothers previewed from an album they
kept mentioning from the stage to be released in the fall. This is
everything I was hoping for after seeing them live. It captures the
brothers' dynamic as Scott and Seth Avett, along with bassist Bob
Crawford and their melding of bluegrass and rock (which leans way
towards the non-rock side of things).In fact, this album almost single-handedly rescues the moribund "Americana" genre from too many bearded bands that have forgotten that empty spaces often say more than over-layering the tracks. Songs like the title track and "Ten Thousand Words" are naked with emotions, yet the band knows that "Kick Drum Heart" or "Slight Figure of Speech" are just as OK with a pop hook then without. They've discovered (and I would bet producer Rick Rubin - who signed them to his American label personally - influenced this) that you can make epic music without being grandiose or saccharin.
When the Avetts get to the album's final song, "Incomplete and Insecure", they sing "I haven't finished a thing since I started my life, I don't feel much like starting now." "I and Love and You" utterly blasts that as a lie, because this album, which captures all the best elements of older groups like The Band
or Rubin's mining of Johnny Cash's forgotten talents, The Avett
Brothers are now showing that they have what it takes to make it in the
majors, and do so on their own terms.
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