The Avett Brothers & Mike Patton — AVTT/PTTN (Thirty Tigers) (13th Floor Album Review)
Some collaborations feel engineered. Some feel accidental. AVTT/PTTN by The Avett Brothers & Mike Patton feels like a doorway opening between two worlds that never expected to meet. It is the kind of project that sounds improbable until you hear it, and then it feels strangely inevitable.
The Avett Brothers, long-time masters of confessional folk and harmony rich Americana, and Mike Patton, known for Faith No More, Mr Bungle and a career spent shapeshifting through experimental rock, step through the doorway together and find an unsettling quiet revelation waiting on the other side. Their shared album moves in emotional vignettes, each one a reckoning between the past and the future, stillness and movement, restraint and release.
What makes this album remarkable is how naturally it unfolds. The Avetts bring their clarity and unease, their instinct for melodies that sound lived rather than written. Patton brings volatility and imagination, a dramatic vocabulary that can tilt toward the cosmic or grotesque. Together they create something reflective, unnerving, and darkly beautiful.
The album opens with Dark Night of My Soul, a slow and measured piece where every word feels weighted. Strings settle over the track like a low cloud and the vocals sit close to the microphone, reflective and almost afraid to disturb the air. Violence simmers underneath. It is powerful precisely because it remains held in, a confession whispered through clenched teeth.
From there, the record deepens and expands. To Be Known feels lighter, almost tentative at first, notes chiming out like a hesitant invitation. The song leans outward instead of inward, nudging itself toward the world after the stillness of the opener. I’m Tired circles back like a recurring dream and the music thins at times to almost nothing, just voices and a lonely guitar tracing the edge of memory.
Heaven’s Breath expands the canvas. Electric guitars pound a rhythm then pull back into scratchier chords that tighten the atmosphere. Spoken passages add urgency and a cinematic tension. The refrain of “come back down” drags everything downward even as the sonics climb. The track grows wild then stops abruptly, leaving the listener suspended.
Across the album’s middle stretch, the songs drift between shadow and illumination, each one testing the edges of the collaboration. Too Awesome returns briefly to acoustic territory with a mysterious glow. The full band rises and falls like a tide around the line “you are a gift” before slipping into quiet again. Disappearing lingers between states, its guitar and vocals kept central, surrounded by small sonic details: a flicker of piano, an occasional drum hit, a drone that suggests something dissolving just out of sight. Eternal Love builds from a gentle guitar pulse into spoken storytelling and echoing vocals. The dread of the title becomes a motif. Drums gather momentum until a mid-song swirl of synth and percussion sends the track into darker waters. The roughness of the vocal keeps it human.
The album reaches its most menacing point in The Ox Driver’s Song. Electric guitars drive the motion forward while drums crack like a whip. The vocals arrive rough and frayed then split into a second, even more distorted voice. A chant loops and mutates. The track builds tension through repetition and echo until it fades like a storm passing in the distance.
The final turn is toward tenderness. The Things I Do centres on strummed acoustic guitar and quiet spoken lines that grow into echoing layers of synths, drums and harmonies. The repeated phrase “time I spend with you” feels like memory replaying itself. It is a song of restraint, and of someone trying to tell the truth without breaking anything or anyone in the process.
Everything resolves with Received. Drums sway with a gentle beat and guitars drone beneath them. The title word lands with a subtle fanfare before the sound drops again and answers itself. Desert skies, lonely beaches, valleys, hotel rooms, open doors. A life measured in places and moments. A closing recognition that every gift of love we carry was once received.
AVTT/PTTN is a meeting of two very different artists who look at the same truth from opposite angles. The result is unsettling, immersive and strangely moving. Its emotional depth lingers long after the final note fades.
John Bradbury
Listen to the new album, out now, here.
