"Now that my bodies grown the lonely heart poetry / Droning in hearts becomes songs that all objects / Sing to each other like friends telling stories" (from "Ed Is A Portal")

To compare Akron/Family to anything, you kind of have to compare them to everything. Either way, you're risking a deserved reviewer's remorse. While you can hear the classic rock influences so forcefully at moments, they are only moments. That is to say that these flashes of homage to the greats are no less bright and brilliant than the apt maneuvers through amnesiac movements and remarkably strange sound samples that make the group's new (and fourth) album, Love Is Simple (Young God Records), just as original as it is wise.

You know a great and mysterious journey has begun a mere minute and a half into the second track, "Ed Is A Portal". When the drums finally join the beckoning chorus, we are whisked over a summit, rumbling merrily down rolling rapids of guitar, chanting, and chirping. Reminiscent of, yet a marked departure from, previous endeavors, Love Is Simple retains the campfire jamboree exultation, but this time with a more masterful intent presiding over their wily, experimental jazz-fest noise fetish tendencies. When I say amnesiac movements, I mean the style that seems to avoid your basic, predictable song structures. And it's that curious joke, where you catch yourself checking the track number three times on what is apparently the same song, that refreshing versatility, that also has you ready to start the album over again halfway through. Further, it is the combination of this technique with the lyrics that rather successfully and cohesively imparts themes of freedom and jubilation throughout. In this way, there's a lot more to be gained from actually reading the lyrics after the initial listen. Not only to avoid your basically disastrous inaccuracies ("Ed Is A Poodle"? I swear that's what I heard at first.), but because the diction sounds purposefully busted up and perhaps more vigorously self-referential to the album as a philosophical illustration - "Now don't start that shit, / That pit-er-pat bit bout / Shamanistic shaker spells and / Alpha beta grammar slides / Water belly floppy drivin'".

Now do I mean to start that shit? Well, maybe. To avoid labeling Akron/Family's intentions, or implying too much instruction beneath the surface, let's just stick to the facts. Just after the completion of Love Is Simple, the group was reduced to a trio comprised of Dana Janssen, Seth Olinsky, and Miles Seaton, when original member Ryan Vanderhoof "went to live in a Buddhist Dharma center in the Midwest." After discovering that the lyrics to "I've Got Some Friends" are the words of Traktung Rinpoche, this departure didn't seem so unexpected to me. The musical composition on the track is a brilliant interpretation of Rinpoche's poetry, which fits remarkably well with their other lyrics on the album. With a gloriously erratic inundation of noises and rapidity, this song is sure to have you bouncing around with an Animal Collective-esque fluttery joy.

When all is nearly said and done, we have "Of All The Things" - a pretty open reckoning with poetic language, if not an all out rallying call to question diction. It works as a potential summary of the theme and theory, the exercises in freedom, of the preceding explosion that is Love Is Simple. With intensely rich parallels posing a very 'everyone is welcome, you could be any one of these voices' feeling, this album is a success for Akron/Family. Brandishing a developed sense of articulate timing, it's apparent these guys are really reaching high enough this time to offer us a little bit of everything. And if you're a lyrical monster, or just as plainly odd and publicly unbearable as I am, you'll be spouting quotes from this album for a while.