Do the Avett Brothers ever wake up feeling cranky? Mean-spirited? Less than generous? Their songs all communicate an unfailingly chummy earnestness that stems from candid introspection and unbidden love for their fellow man, and perhaps more than their brotherly harmonies or their rambunctious take on string-band Americana, that sincerity is their chief appeal. Of late, however, the Avetts' self-reckoning has grown so overbearing that it borders on obsession and threatens to limit their musical range. I and Love and You, their sixth studio album, doesn't break from their monolithic solemnity, but actually intensifies it: The hook on "Ten Thousand Words" goes, "Ain't it like most people, I'm no different, we love to talk on things we don't know about." On "The Perfect Space", they sing in sharp harmony: "I want to have friends who love me for the man I become, not the man that I was." There's a similar potential yearbook quote in every song-- every verse, just about-- and after a while, you may begin to wish they'd get angry about something, or, god forbid, crack an ironic joke.
I and Love and You is a crucial album for the band. One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade, they spent years self-releasing albums and self-promoting shows to gradually growing audiences, eventually signing to North Carolina indie label Ramseur before moving up to Sony/BMG/Columbia Records. For their major-label debut, the trio (which includes brothers Scott and Seth and unrelated bass player Bob Crawford) worked with producer Rick Rubin, whose involvement gives the album added critical and commercial cache. With a large and loyal fanbase, they could be as big as Dave Matthews and bring string-band rootsiness to the mainstream. Or not. One thing is for sure: After I and Love and You, they can no longer go back to being the Avett Brothers they once were.
As a major-label debut, the album plays to one set of their strengths while ignoring others. The Avetts continue to emphasize bold melodic lines, emphatic performances, and lyrics whose self-criticism is so magnanimous it becomes a form of self-praise. "And It Spread" moves from gentle to raucous the way more pedestrian bands do quiet-loud, and "January Wedding" is so delicate it nearly blows away in its own breeziness. These songs draw less from the celebratory energy of Mignonette and Emotionalism-- rambling albums whose spirited imperfections made them all the more endearing-- and more from the recent Gleam EPs, which showcased a calmer, more polite acoustic craftsmanship. That trend may predate Rubin's involvement, but here it sounds like a product of the Beard's approach to Americana, which is unerringly clean, sparse, and tasteful.
Every instrument sounds perfectly placed, and that's a shame because the Avetts got more mileage out of their rough edges than most bands this decade. Buffing away their rough edges and rowdy quirks, Rubin establishes a mood of intense pensiveness even on the first song, when they announce they're getting no sleep till Brooklyn. The title track builds carefully as the brothers ask the borough to welcome them, carefully adding an instrument or two with each verse until the song reaches its destination-- a big, cathartic finale. Most of the songs that follow employ a similar technique: opening with a soft acoustic intro, then inserting other sounds to underline the sentiments. It's effective until it becomes predictable, but later in the album, "Laundry Room" plays around with that formula, following a winding path from a gentle near-ballad (marred only by the lyric "I am a breathing time machine") as it transforms into a swirling bluegrass jam that's one of the album's finest moments.
There are surprisingly durable hooks on the stand-out "Tin Man" and the upbeat "Slight Figure of Speech", which, back to back, make the second half much livelier and more tenacious than the first. Rubin allows the Avetts to expand their sound and indulge these pop urges, but not always to great effect. With its jaunty piano theme and insistent screaming, "Kick Drum Heart" tries for Wilco but achieves Guster. Generally, there's a refinement to I and Love and You that seems slightly out of step for a group that has built an audience on performances and recordings that sound rawly spontaneous and heartfelt; breathlessly conveying their positive message has always been more crucial than deciding where to put the banjo or how prominent to make the strings. These songs, on the other hand, are more purposeful, more written, more professional. It's not that there's no room for such studio nuance in the Avetts' music, but it gives I and Love and You a quotidian sheen, making their signature sincerity seem sappy and much less special.
