Mike Patton has never been an artist afraid of the weird, the abrasive or the wilfully obtuse, so the former Faith No More frontman’s team-up with folk-rockers The Avett Brothers always felt primed for some kind of combustion, creative or otherwise. What we get instead is a record stitched together remotely over several years that sits in an uncanny midpoint: oddly intimate, strangely anonymous, occasionally brilliant, intermittently baffling.
Opener Dark Night of My Soul is the album’s cleanest statement of intent. Fingerpicked guitars and tight three-part harmonies sketch something warm and handmade, but Patton’s presence — half shadow, half tequila shot — adds a weight that stops the song drifting into pure Avett-core.
There’s tension to it, a sense that both sides are feeling out the edges of the collaboration, deciding how much of themselves to reveal.
It feels like an online meet-cute that could do with a weekend away to really thrash out if there is a relationship there.
Things get livelier with Heaven’s Breath, where the trio stop politely circling each other and actually collide. Fuzzy guitars, a grinding mid-tempo stomp and Patton in full camp-goth croon push the Avetts somewhere they’d never go alone. You can hear the seams stretching, sometimes gloriously, sometimes awkwardly, but it’s the most convincing argument for why this project exists at all.
There’s a flash of the Mr Bungle theatricality Scott Avett openly studied, and you wish the album leaned into this deranged energy more often. The Ox Driver’s Song reaches for this — the sound is industrial-metal Americana, goth with braces and waistcoats instead of eyeliner — but the clearest showcase of their shared strengths arrives with Eternal Love, a spectral drift that lets all three voices breathe.
The arrangement is tasteful, the harmonies deft, and Patton’s delivery is surprisingly vulnerable, landing with genuine emotional heft. It hints at a stranger, softer record hiding beneath the surface noise. But ‘AVTT/PTTN’ is ultimately a compromise: not quite Patton’s chaos, not quite the Avetts’ earnestness. There are sparks, certainly, but they illuminate how cautious the wider project feels. As experiments go, it’s intriguing, occasionally inspired, and generally too polite for its own good.
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