Akron/Family’s latest album also happens to be their finest yet. And while the title may not make much sense, certain words do. For one it’s cosmic and two it is a journey – of sorts. Such attributes are what divide the three-piece from the crowd of tripping psychedelic rockers, meaning any influences you can hear have enough Akron/Family left-of-centre adventurisms mixed in to make it their own.

Without doubt the story of the album’s creation is a great place to start – written in a cabin built into the side of an active volcano in Japan and recorded in an abandoned train station in Detroit, the music is where it goes supernova.

The shimmering guitar, like Hendrix’s National Anthem, in ‘Silly Bears’ turns to blown out drums, swirling noise and some heavenly harmonies – the opposites seem to attract. Green’s Fleetwood Mac can be heard somewhere in the depths of ‘A AAA O A WAY’ (drawn from a chamber of disorder, crashing synths and interference). And the band’s knack for surreal wordplay is firmly intact: ‘Just like them I stopped giving my change to all the homeless people out on the street, but I changed back, I give my change again to anyone who asks’ sounds perfectly in tune within the rough, stumbling rock of ‘So It Goes’.

The set is a continual experience: ups and downs, straight roads to self-made passages. And there are moments of beauty swimming alongside the bizarre, like ‘Cast a Net’, where the harmonising and acoustics feel timeless. Ending on the trickling piano notes, whistling guitars and melancholic tones that guide ‘Creator’ brings it all back to earth, feet firmly on the ground.

Having lost a founding member three years back, Akron/Family sound strangely more like themselves than ever before, whatever that is – reaching a place of bewildering rock and cosmic roll. FD