North Carolina Americana fraternalists the Avett Brothers have pooled their powers with Mike Patton (yes, that Mike Patton), the avant-metal contortionist, on a stripped-down, barstool-weepin’ roots LP that’s not as conceptually unhinged as the premise suggests. The secret history here is that the adolescent Avetts were way more likely to have Helmet‘s Betty rattling in the dashboard than Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline.
By the late 1990s, these boys from Concord were out there doing screamo in a Flipper-meets-Pixies noise outfit called Nemo before they ever discovered the beard-oil spirituality of acoustic roots music. So for them, collaborating with the vocalist for Mr. Bungle isn’t a left-field lark so much as the long arc bending back around.
So how did Patton get roped into this whole pastoral fever dream? The boring-but-true version is that Scott Avett had already outed himself—first in a 2016Rolling Stoneinterview, then again toConsequence of Sound’s Lior Phillips in 2019—as a full-on Mike Patton superfan. In turn, Patton reached back with a “Hey man, if you ever want to do something, the door’s open.” Within a year, the Avetts were firing off demos.
Patton, normally elbow-deep in madcap grindcore or crooning Italian pop ballads and squaring off with jazz players, found himself up against a blazingly raw challenge here: trying to fuse that elastic, unhinged voice and his metalhead reflexes into a style that looks simple on paper but is absolutely merciless once you strip away the Ampeg cabs and Tama warhorse drum kits.
Genuine Americana survives on songwriting and trust, and in this case, both were being directed by a pair of actual brothers. Patton’s workaround, per the press kit, was to imagine himself as some estranged Avett cousin kept out back until the family remembered they had him. “Maybe they kept him in the chicken coop or some shit and brought him out years later,” he says.
On first listen, the self-titled record registers as pure Avett Brothers, as dusty, roots-centric acoustic fare that might as well come pre-packaged with a mason jar. You could be forgiven for assuming Patton basically holstered his whole deal and agreed to play the quiet cousin in the corner. Still, by the third or fourth spin, the paint peels off and you realize these songs aren’t nearly as plainspoken as their flannel-and-fretwork surfaces imply.
Take the opener, “Dark Night of My Soul”, almost aggressively normal until these faint, spectral howls accumulate at the edges of the mix, the sort of distant weirdness you’d expect on California-era Bungle, except here they never really go sideways. They just hover, unsettling the rustic wallpaper.
Shifting from the more rust-stained tenderness that cushions a lot of the record, “Heaven’s Breath” marks the first track Scott Avett lobbed into the mix once this whole improbable collaboration actually started moving, an early gesture toward cranking the proverbial saw. His solid-body Guild runs through a fuzz box like a love letter to the brothers’ grunge adolescence. The track might be the most overtly Pattonesque moment here: the baritone mutterings and half-spoken passages brush against something you’d find skulking on a Nick Cave record.
Sure, on first pass, the tune can feel a little less “organic”, maybe even slightly out of step with all the sibling harmonies that define the Avett Brothers’ gravitational field. Listen again, though, and that song becomes the place where the brothers’ rock impulses and Patton’s lifelong attraction to denser, stranger compositions actually braid together instead of canceling each other out.
The most deeply affecting stretch of the album arrives in the back half with “Eternal Love”, shorthand for “the dread of eternal love”, the song’s emotional engine running on that contradiction. “I take my pills, I drink my drinks,” Patton sings, a Merle Haggard-grade confession over gentle guitar lines that gather momentum as the percussion thickens. The harmonies widen to include all three voices, Seth’s high register floating above it all. Patton’s bass-heavy vocals rumble, doing that double-duty of convincing you— maybe convincing himself that he’s that estranged cousin, method-acting his way into the family’s harmonic field. What emerges is a meditation on love’s stubborn refusal to never let you forget the weight it carries.
The record closes with “Received”, the lengthiest track, a final statement built from banjo, acoustic guitar, percussion, and a faint, unhurried organ. The song leans into the record’s twin themes of handmade sorrow and lingering regret. Still, it also resolves the musical tensions scattered across the earlier tracks, as if arguing for the album as a unified whole rather than a handful of songs that merely happen to share a sleeve. Heard in isolation, certain moments could fool you into thinking this is just an Avett Brothers record with an unusually adventurous guest vocalist. Taken as a whole, though, AVTT/PTTN asserts itself as a record born of mutual creation.
I’ve probably written more about Mike Patton than any other musician; I’ve been idolizing the guy since the previous century (which sounds hyperbolic until you realize it’s depressingly factual). Two decades back, after one of those chaotically sentimental garage-band rehearsals, a couple of us sat around blasting “RV” off Angel Dust and “Take This Bottle” from King for a Day, trying to reverse-engineer what a Mike Patton country record might sound like, imagining his voice negotiating pedal steel and heartbreak.
Since pretty much everything Patton touches involves some degree of bastardization, AVTT/PTTN’s most menacing moment—a swampy take on “The Ox Driver’s Song”, that folk chestnut covered by everyone from Pete Seeger to Burl Ives— feels like a dispatch from the alternate universe where he made that record 20 years ago. The canyonesque, lightly distorted banjo tangled with infernal drum programming, almost a Bone Machine–era Tom Waits lurch, offers a distorted glimpse of the album that might’ve been, the one we were imagining back in that grimy rehearsal space.
The record we actually get? That’s a different beast: confessional folk tunes bleeding regret all over the floorboards, and long, hollowed-out stretches of hurt you earn by living long enough to watch your own bad choices grow teeth. Everybody grows up eventually—emotionally, professionally—and on this LP, you can hear them doing it.
Worth flagging, Patton mentioned in a recent chat with Garden & Gun that as he drifts into what he calls “senior citizen territory”, he’s craving “less wandering, less train hopping”. So while this project might look, “on paper”, like yet another scenic detour in the Patton Multiverse, he insists the whole thing somehow “feels like home”.
Rest assured, I’m a Bungle-and-Fantômas lifer, and long fantasized about Patton’s eventual chrysalis into some elder-statesman soft-jazz crooner—the David Lynch of lounge music, drifting through cigar haze and brushed cymbals—and, yes, part of me selfishly roots for that route. Yet this Avett Brothers detour isn’t a darkly comic fall-from-grace moment so much as watching something long-rumored finally snapping into place. Patton melts into the Avetts’ world like a rogue chemical, and they, in turn, are willingly swallowed by his funhouse vortex.
What crawls out the other side isn’t a compromise or even a collaboration in the tidy sense, but a mutant third-thing soldered together from the wreckage of two very different camps. The record broods and might even irritate the fanbases on both ends, which, knowing Mike Patton, could be at least partially the point. Though for all the record’s shadows and splinters, this album features some of the most heart-on-sleeve tunes either party has ever coughed up.