It’s been a few weeks since our last album review, I have been busy trying to enlist some new writers so that we can get more consistency in the blog posts.  Today’s post is from Dusty Little one of our Community Group Leaders at Mars Hill Olympia.  I am excited that he reviewed the Avett Brothers, I really like these guys and Dusty’s take on the record is spot on.  Enjoy!

The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You

The Avett Brothers hail from North Carolina and play rootsy music replete with jangly banjos, earnest lyrics, syrupy harmonies, hollered lyrics, and way too many songs titled “Pretty Girl from…” For their new album, I and Love and You, The Avetts leap to a major label and enlist bearded wonder Rick Rubin, the uber-producer whose list of musical masterpieces runs even longer than his magnificient mutton chops. The result is a lovely album that, if there’s any justice in the pop music universe, will propel them to superstardom.

The titular “I”, “love”, and “you” might initially seem like three topics of discussion as listed by a guy who under-uses commas and still struggles with pronouns, but a close listen to the title track reveals them instead to be the “three words that became hard to say” as listed by the narrator, who presumably under-uses commas but seems to have pronouns under control. The track opens with piano and voice and adds drums, strings, French horns, acoustic guitars, the kitchen sink, and organ before breathtakingly peeling back the layers to showcase the lyric: “Dumbed down and numbed by time and age/Your dreams to catch the world, the cage”.

“January Wedding” breezily pays tribute to the narrator’s ornithologist fiancé (“she knows which birds are singing”), and contains the albums most conspicuous banjo work. Subsequent tracks deftly sequence lovely piano ballads (“The Perfect Space”, “Ill with Want”), mid-tempo strummers (“And it Spread”, “Ten Thousand Words”), and upbeat acoustic rockers (“Kick Drum Heart”, “Tin Man”, “Slight Figure of Speech”); with restrained instrumentation, gorgeous harmonies, catchy melodies, and thoughtful lyrics that provide consistent quality throughout.

Highlights abound, and particularly include the album’s closing tracks. “It Goes On and On” starts with old-school Avetts’-style 4/4 tomfoolery before a cascading piano bridges to the album’s finest harmonies and a section starting at 1:35 that I wouldn’t dare spoil by trying to describe. “Incomplete and Insecure” enlists soaring harmonies and pleas to God (“What is important? What’s really important? Am I ever to know by name? Will I ever know silence without mental violence? Will the raining at night go away? It’s up to you, my father, call on me.”) to close the album on a high note.

I and Love and You, while perhaps a bit short on the ramshackle banjos, front-porch spontaneity, and playfulness of prior Avett Brothers releases, rewards listeners with 13 well-crafted tracks and due to its consistency and restraint surpasses their previous work. Pick it up now, and you might still be able to say that you knew about The Avett Brothers way back when.

–4.25/5 stars–

Dusty Little