Let’s get the boring bit out of the way first: AVTT/PTTN contains Mike Patton – a man who made me see music differently with Faith No More. What looks on the surface like a warm, organic record is, in reality, something far stranger. It was recorded entirely at distance.
The story is almost as compelling as the music. AVTT/PTTN has been several years in the making. Back in 2019, Scott Avett sent Patton some song demos that stopped him in his tracks. From there they traded ideas, sounds, lyrics, shapes, moods – yet never met in person. The whole thing was stitched together remotely, engineered by Dana Nielsen (SZA, Bob Dylan, Weezer, Rhianna, Slayer, Post Malone) and produced by Patton, Avett, and Nielsen. Somehow, impossibly, the record feels both intimate and unknowable.
Those harmonies that glow so warmly? They hide a greater truth. At times the album feels like staring into the dark night of the soul: “I wanna hurt somebody,” Patton confesses, and the harmonica that haunts the early moments only deepens the disquiet. The piano on “To Be Known” carries that same ghostly weight – deceptively beautiful, quietly unsettling.
The instrumentation throughout is alluring but scary, like something reaching for you in the half-light. “We Are One Longing To Be None” almost feels like a signal flare, its first riff very 80s in tone, poetry set against the idea of what The Doors might have sounded like had they pitched up in 1985.
Acoustic moments soften the edges, Patton slipping into falsetto with ambition, making the whole thing feel widescreen. That cinematic sense continues on “Disappearing Again,” a track that seems to dissolve the room around you. “Eternal Love” moves in the opposite direction – a wonderful wash of Americana, warm and dusty, like headlights on a dirt road.
Their harmonies remain adept throughout, sometimes delta-soaked, sometimes spectral, and when the drums finally explode, it’s like the handbrake has been torn away.
“All The Things I Do” appears gentle, but its darkness is unmistakable – a song without beginning or end, just a loop of quiet dread. “Received” provides something like a settled conclusion. “There is a distance that we will reach,” they sing, and that sense of moving toward a horizon – uncertain, shimmering, just out of reach – is the perfect place for AVTT/PTTN to end.
A record made apart, but somehow absolutely together.
