True Sadness

Ultimately, True Sadness is a confessional set of songs, revealing in many ways and vulnerable in many others. However, honesty has always been an inherent element in their sound, so in that sense this album’s no different.

If Seth’s letter announcing its arrival prior to release has any overarching voice in this, their goal of developing a record that portrays itself as “multidimensional as its makers” has been thoroughly achieved.

There's often been a whiff of contrivance around the Avetts, but by coming of age they come up smelling of roses. [Aug 2016, p.92]

True Sadness is very much a musical olio (it's easy to pick up on countless other influences, as well), but as a whole, the album envelops the listener, like the embrace of a comfortable blanket.

With True Sadness, The Avett Brothers open up to their audience, sharing their dark depths with tenacity and bravado, all while inspiring to see struggles as strength.

There’s True Sadness, whose songs touch lyrically upon all things sad but with various shades of unsubtle sound to guide them. [No. 133, p.54]

It's in this elemental balancing of sorrow and joy that the band burns hottest.

Far from being an album for wallowing in the depths of grief, True Sadness is a record about the emergence of hope.

Fortunately, they haven't forsaken their natural songwriting strengths. [Aug 2016, p.70]

[An] unapologetically polished album, which reframes their music without sapping their identity.

The record doesn’t fully commit to a new direction, so its primary audience will still be Avett diehards, but it’s a fun listen for the summer and a testament to the brothers’ enduring success as one of the savvier folk groups out there.

Alongside its distracting flaws, True Sadness contains some truly beautiful music--and a good measure of the joyous energy that The Avett Brothers employ to transcendent effect live--but there’s no guiding principle here, resulting in a dizzy mess of an album that doesn’t live up to the band’s talents.

While the experiments in modern techniques here vary in effectiveness, they at least spur the band to capture the spontaneity and jubilance of their often rapturous live shows--a spirit that often gets lost when they pack their albums with painfully sincere, stone-faced balladry. In fact, it's when the Avetts lean back on their standard neo-bluegrass style that True Sadness is at its dullest.

Underneath their smart stylistic kinks, however, lies a fundamentally old-fashioned imagination. [Aug 2016, p.107]

For all the talk of creative epiphany, their music remains the country-tinged comfort blanket it always was.