Just a month out from their much anticipated collaboration album with Mike Patton, AVTT/PTTN, the Avett Brothers released a single titled “Heaven’s Breath”. Despite the name, the new visualizer video released with the single suggests much darker themes. The video features a variety of scenes of snakes slithering and hissing laid over scenes of fire and a full moon.
The single definitely signals a new direction, or at the very least a new sound, and is unlike anything the group has released so far. The Avett brothers made their names through their folksy, and sometimes rock, sound. In “Heaven’s Breath” the brothers debut a new and heavily distorted guitar tone and much darker lyrics than ever before.
Perhaps this could be in part to the brothers’ partner for this album, Mike Patton. Patton was front man for the group Faith No More before embarking on his solo career. He’s known for his unique vocals, vocals that help bring alive the dark and twisted poetry of the lyrics.
The visualizer video toys with depictions of hell showing the serpent slithering through the flames, and the theory is only further confirmed in the lyrics. There are strong themes of death and afterlife throughout the song with plenty of repetition of the line “Come back down” and is later reinforced by the line: “Which one of you here guides the abyss
The crack of thunder the serpent’s hiss”.
The album AVTT/PTTN is set to have eight original tracks, of which two have now been released, and a cover of the traditional folk song “Ox Driver’s Song”. The single is an excellent example of the range of the Avett Brothers, a range that they’ll look to show off balancing out a heavy song such as “Heaven’s Breath” and follow it up later with the folksy “Ox Driver’s Song”.
photo credit: Ekaterina Gorbacheva
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