Animal Collective: Painting With

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: PAINTING WITH (2016)

1) FloriDada; 2) Hocus Pocus; 3) Vertical; 4) Lying In The Grass; 5) The Burglars; 6) Natural Selection; 7) Bagels In Kiev; 8) On Delay; 9) Spilling Guts; 10) Summing The Wretch; 11) Golden Gal; 12) Recycling.

After the overdubbing excesses of Centipede Hz, its follow-up Painting With almost sounds like an exercise in stripping down to the basics — quieter, less cluttered with bombastic overdubs, sort of an «Animal Collective-lite», back-to-roots version of the transcendental-psychedelic AC of the past ten years. As far as I understand, much of this has to do with the band dropping their reliance on the reverb effect — and so, this time around, they bring the music right into your living room instead of having it drop down on you from the skies, in a benevolent gesture from the Olympian gods of candy-colored psychedelia.

Another change is that the songs are getting shorter: the entire record is over in less than fourty minutes, with the longest track clocking in at a measly 4:33 (which led them to jokingly calling this «our Ramones album»). By throwing out lengthy build-ups and drones and relying far more on the strength of vocal melodies than they used to, they are indeed moving as close to the «pop» format as is possible for The Animal Collective without ceasing to be The Animal Collective and beginning to be The Sellout Collective. Not that anybody should be worried — the whole thing still sounds totally insane — but this time we are presented with a lighter, fluffier form of insanity, sort of a silly romp of elfish kids through Central Park rather than a solemn ritual performed with the goal of breaking through into another dimension. Or, perhaps, a more accurate analogy would be that, if Merryweather Post Pavillion is this band's Pet Sounds and Centipede Hz is an attempt at its Smile, then Painting With is their Wild Honey — a definite step backwards in terms of experimentation without sacrificing too much of the essence.

Contrary to rumors, Painting With is quite a diverse record: capturing the songs in an analytical web, anyone can see that ʽFloriDadaʼ is retro-sunshine pop, ʽHocus Pocusʼ is folk-based prog­ressive rock, ʽVerticalʼ is contemporary R&B, ʽNatural Selectionʼ is fast-tempo techno-pop, and there's quite a few other musical genres lurking in the shadows, too — the problem being that, once they all go through the prescribed Animal Collective filter, the substantial differences be­tween them are neutralised. Sure there's no more reverb, but the band's technique of overdubbing psychedelic vocal harmonies and entrusting the melodic backbone to humming-bubbling synthe­sizers remains quite stable, so every single song sets almost precisely the same mood, and the inherent differences of all these musical genres are not only not exploited, but diligently covered up by the production. In the end, there's absolutely no reason for me to discuss what makes any two of these tracks stand out from each other — who really cares about complex time signatures or peculiarities of voice distribution over different sound channels when no matter what you do, you come out with more or less the same result?

Repeated listens are essential for the record, because at first (and at second, and at third...) it just sounds like a big jar of sweet sonic goo — short song lengths not helping any, and vocal hooks all reduced to the same common psychedelic denominator. Eventually, through the aid of some particularly outstanding vocal lines (like the chorus to ʽFloriDadaʼ), the tracks come apart, but just barely so, and I am still left wondering: it is one thing when we are exposed to, say, a full album of same-mood ballads by Sinatra or Dusty Springfield, but with a band as experimental as these guys, is it really right that it should take so much time to separate one track from another? I guess you really have to love The Animal Collective to death, and to «get» this kind of sound in your heart the way other people «get» Willie Nelson or J. J. Cale, to give Painting With all the admiration it may deserve.

But there's the catch — I think that this shorter-song, simpler-sound approach does them a dis­favor in the end. At least for me, much too often, the album ends up on the verge of being annoying: all those hee-haw-hee-haw vocals, when they are not directly carried out into the stratosphere, as they used to, eventually bring on associations with village idiots and bad taste humorists. If the record's major purpose is to convey a feeling of light-hearted joy, as I believe it is, then, as far as I am concerned, it fails. Not that I envy the band's position: having clearly peaked at the turn of the decade, they have nothing left to prove and (probably) nothing left to blow our minds even one more time, so any further experimental detour, be it even in the direc­tion of «de-experimentalizing» themselves, is potentially welcome. But one cannot also avoid asking oneself the horrid question about jumping the shark — because, for all I know, the point of Painting With might be to state "It's Only Psycho Pop, But I Like It, Yes I Do", and if so, who's gonna be carrying the real banner of psychedelia into the 2010s? Kanye West?..

Animal Collective: Live At 9:30

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: LIVE AT 9:30 (2015)

1) Amanita; 2) Did You See The Words; 3) Honeycomb; 4) My Girls; 5) Moonjock; 6) New Town Burnout; 7) I Think I Can; 8) Pulleys; 9) What Would I Want?; 10) Peacebone; 11) Monkey Riches; 12) Brother Sport; 13) The Purple Bottle.

Technically, this is Animal Collective's third live album, but in a sense, it could just as well be the first, because Hollinndagain consisted exclusively of original material (and shit material at that), while the limited edition Animal Crack Box from 2009 was restricted to just a few vinyl copies. Continuing this trend, Live At 9:30 also comes specifically for collectors, pressed on six sides of bright-colored psychovinyl, but at least it is also distributed as digital files, making it more widely available — and it is also officially released on the band's main label (Domino), whereas Animal Crack Box was more of a homebrewn affair.

Anyway, the big question is: are these «post-fame» Animal Collective actually worthy of a live album, or is this just a quick (but colorful) money grab at the expense of collectors? Well, I am hardly the band's biggest fan, but my answer is a definitive yes to the first half of this question (although it is also a slightly more doubtful yes to the second half — I mean, high art and money-grabbing are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are they?). The thing is, once they get on stage, these guys do not care so much for an exact reproduction of the spritely pandemonium of their studio recordings as they do for creating spritely pandemonium, period. And the longer it lasts, the better — look at these track lengths: even though most of the songs are taken from officially released records, the collective runtime is almost twice as long as it takes to listen to the studio equivalents of the live record. Time stretches out to indefinite limits at Animal Collective shows, that one's for sure.

At this point, the band clearly refuses to rest upon past successes: the largest number of tracks come from the most recent Centipede Hz, with only two coming from Merryweather Post Pavilion (still arguably the centerpiece of the band's modern day legend) and the rest scattered evenly all the way up to Feels (but no earlier). However, track selection really does not matter that much, because when they're up on stage, Animal Collective present themselves as a «jam band», setting up one mind-boggling groove after another (and accompanying them with an equally mind-boggling light show that, unfortunately, stays out of the audio experience) and animating, aggrandizing and accelerating them to ecstatic heights. In this setting, anything can serve as a working theme, upon which they pile up their arrays of keyboard effects, tribal drum patterns, and vocal harmonies that ignite, shoot up, and burst apart like sets of fireworks.

The original compositions are not changed to the point of being unrecognizable — no, the melo­dies and even the arrangement details tend to be preserved, but the music gets longer expositions and the repetitive ritualistic grooves get to become truly gigantic (an extreme example is ʽPul­leysʼ, stretched out almost Cream-style from an original three and a half minute length to about 15 minutes). If you put all six sides of vinyl together, there are definite signs of overkill; but if you take it slow, about half an hour at a time, for instance, the result is a strong psychedelic punch that really sounds like nothing else. This is not «electronica» with its formulaic rigidity: these are your past-and-future-merging 21st century SMiLing Beach Boys, where vocals matter as much as instruments (sometimes more) and electronic sound production is no more distant and alienating to the mind as, say, any special production effects on Sgt. Pepper.

The usual complaint is that behind all the kaleidoscopic richness of this approach lies a certain monotonousness — that the entire 2-hour long show is just one huge celebration of an alternate psychedelic reality, populated with bizarre, but generally friendly alternate lifeforms that seem, however, all to belong to the same infraclass: not just an «Animal Collective», that is, but rather a «Psychomarsupial Community» or something like that, where each member is slightly different but common enough so that eventually you just get lost in the all-too-similar diversity. With em­phasis on the «jam» parts, this inevitably downplays the memorable main themes of the tunes and concentrates on the vibe, and the vibe is pretty much the same throughout. If they happened to have their own idiosyncratic equivalent of a ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ or at least a ʽWillie The Pimpʼ on here for diversity's sake, their status would have seriously increased at least in this reviewer's eyes — then again, they probably know better than to sacrilegiously break up the spiritual ritual and annihilate the mesmerizing effect on the audience, so forget it.

In any case, kudos to what it is they actually manage to do on stage — it's one thing to generate all these multi-layered arrangements in the cozy spacetime of the recording studio, and quite another one to generate all the layers simultaneously in a live environment: with a little help from the same digital technologies, no doubt, but the singing (with all those intertwining harmonies), the drumming, and much of the keyboard work are really live, and display consummate profes­sionalism (to be expected, perhaps, after 15 years of gelling together, but nonetheless amazing). Love 'em or hate 'em, they are pretty much one of the most obvious symbols of innovative musical culture in our little «impoverished through too much enrichment» 21st century, so a guaranteed thumbs up here in any situation.

Animal Collective: Centipede Hz

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: CENTIPEDE HZ (2012)

1) Moonjock; 2) Today's Supernatural; 3) Rosie Oh; 4) Applesauce; 5) Wide Eyed; 6) Father Time; 7) New Town Burnout; 8) Monkey Riches; 9) Mercury Man; 10) Pulleys; 11) Amanita.

Having so cleverly blown off the top bubbles from our further expectations with the ODDSAC project, The Animal Collective were now free to generate the «proper» follow-up to Merriwea­ther Post Pavillion without necessarily having to «live up» to it, because «living up» would pro­bably have meant stepping up on the seriousness pedal and making even further concessions to the traditional understanding of «gorgeousness» compared to those already made on Pavillion. But, as we all know, this treacherous road can easily transform mysterious sonic deities into or­dinary musical mortals. As it is, The Animal Collective are quite committed to sticking to that «animal» component in their names.

Centipede Hz, marking the return of Deakin from an extended break that excluded him from the fame of Pavillion, is titled like a surrealistic radio station, and, indeed, right from the opening «this is the news...», with its heavy reliance on the use of static, wave functions, and annoying bits of pseudo-announcements and commercials scattered all over the place, the album sounds like a semi-spontaneous extract from such a station. However, that is not all. Building upon the progress of ODDSAC, the Collective now tax the recording tracks to the max — the sound is so much cluttered with layers of overdubs that, most of the time, the immediate impression is that you actually have two or more pieces of music going on at once. Just the kind of thing you'd get from poor reception in a heavy interference zone.

This is a risky approach — in the hands of non-professionals, this could end up as unlistenable, irritating chaos. But ten years into their recording career, the Animal Collective have worked out a great feel for how to do it correctly. Any single moment in these songs, if you just push the play button at a random spot, will sound like stupid noise. But altogether, these moments add up to almost perfect mathematical order, not forgetting build-ups, sustained tensions, climaxes, resolu­tions, and even hooks (for the brave ones — even singalong hooks!). Deconstruct the melodies, strip them of their excesses, and you will have yourself some cuddly, unexceptional folk-pop skeletons — when it comes to putting chords together, the band hasn't exactly progressed all that much from the days of Feels (not that they really should have). But the very point of the whole thing is — how much denseness and heaviness is allowed before it all crashes down?

Basically, as much as they want. On my favorite tracks — such as ʽApplesauceʼ — flying saucers whoosh by, electronic rivers of sampler sound trickle along, drums alternate between syncopated and straight patterns, and I cannot properly tell how many different roads are being taken by dif­ferent instruments, but none of them detract from feeling the little bit of kiddie happiness in the repetitive chorus of "...I'm feeling like a little honey can roll". Nor do they prevent me from fee­ling a little pinch of moodiness during the chorus reproach of "you got to slide it off like mercury, can I play my parts like mercury?" (ʽMercury Manʼ) — no, the lyrics, in the good old AC tradi­tion, steadily continue not to make any sense whatsoever, but that does not matter one bit.

That said, there are almost no individual standouts: every second is so crammed with aural de­lights, and most of the delights in question are so enigmatic when it comes to describing the feelings that they stir up, that I find myself at a total loss trying to single out peculiar moments. Arguably the only «special» track here is at the very end: ʽAmanitaʼ starts out in a very focused, collected manner — rather than scattering themselves all over the place in yet another kaleidosco­pic roll, they open things with a catchy, anthemic synth riff that evokes «progressive» memories. But the sternness of the approach pretty soon falters, shatters, and gives way to the predictable sonic explosions.

Yes, the overloaded nature of all these patterns can get monotonous. I mentioned build-ups and resolutions, but it's not the kind of build-ups and resolutions that go from «quiet» to «loud» — over the course of one song, The Animal Collective will be happy to transport you from one part of their surrealistic jungle to another, even denser one, but getting out of the thicket onto the open plains is simply not an option. If you are psychologically unprepared for fifty minutes of electro­nic loops intertwined by twine champions, or all the synthetically processed double-, triple-, and quad­ruple- tracked vocals, it might be better to take these tracks slowly, one or two at a time.

Of course, listeners who got acquainted with the band primarily through ʽMy Girlsʼ or ʽBluishʼ or any of those other Brian Wilson-influenced little beauties, and expect more of the same, will get a headache — the gritty reality being that, if one assesses the AC as a whole, the world of Centi­pede Hz is closer to the «true» AC than the baroque flourishes of Merriweather. I certainly miss the baroque flourishes, and wouldn't mind them coming back; but I am also quite amazed at how far they have come in making that same philosophy that irritated me so much on their early re­cords work so well on this one. Apparently, age and experience got to count for something even when it comes to deviant avantgarde mindsets. I don't know how well this thing will be holding up ten years from now, but at least thumbs up will always be thumbs up, I suppose.

Check "Centipede Hz" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Centipede Hz" (MP3) on Amazon

Animal Collective: ODDSAC

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: ODDSAC (2010)

1) Mr. Fingers; 2) Kindle Song; 3) Satin Orb Wash; 4) Green Beans; 5) Screens; 6) Urban Creme; 7) Working; 8) Tantrum Barb; 9) Lady On The Lake; 10) Fried Camp; 11) Fried Vamp; 12) Mess Your House; 13) What Happened?

Technically, Animal Collective's next project after Fall Be Kind was not a proper «album» — it was a joint visual/audio product, with AC providing the music and director Danny Perez provi­ding the spectral hallucinations on the screen. Since the whole thing was made in tandem, it might be reasonably asserted that the music is no good here without the visuals, and that the visuals are worthless without the music. However, anyone familiar with the whole story of Ani­mal Collective will immediately realize that the music is not that different from typical AC so as not to work without the accompanying imagery — and, personally, having watched several of the psychedelic sequences filmed by Perez, I can safely state that this is indeed so. If we can listen to, enjoy, and get inspired by ʽI Am The Walrusʼ and ʽFlyingʼ without necessarily having to watch the Beatles running around in funny suits on the former or delirious rainbow coloring of the sky on the latter, we can do the same with ODDSAC (speaking of which, I do have a suspicion that the experience of Magical Mystery Tour might have been one of the inspirations here).

So I'm just going to say a few words about ODDSAC (whatever that title deciphers to — I pro­pose Over­blown Demented Delirious Stories by the Animal Collective) as a collection of new music, free from any sort of ties to any sort of visuals. (Besides, with the aid of proper substances, anyone is probably capable of conjuring one's own visuals here — why should you feel chained to somebody else's artistic vision?).

In a way, the whole project might have simply been a clever ruse. With Merriweather Post Pavil­lion and its alarming success that almost (but not quite) put the band on the brink of main­stream acceptance, they must have felt an acute need to remind the world that they were, first and foremost, a bunch of musical crazies, not a school of musical gurus. Listen to ʽMy Girlsʼ and ʽNo More Runnin'ʼ long enough and, who knows, you might start discerning the meaning of life in their basic structures (just as your parents did with Pet Sounds a whole wide world ago). In other words, they got too serious, and the emotionality in their music got way too similar to normal hu­man emotionality. One step further and you turn into Radiohead. Two steps, and you turn into Prodigy. Three steps, and whoah, you're the Backstreet Boys...

...all right, that was really a joke, but the idea is clear enough. Hence, a change in direction, slyly motivated by technical reasons — being interested in adapting the music to a set of modern post-post-post-impressionist visuals. This gives the AC a good pretext for turning away from the «nor­malized» melodicity of Pavillion and for returning to their roots — chaotic psychedelia with no limits or boundaries. More than half of ODDSAC is closer in spirit to AC's earliest albums, only with much better production.

A few of the tracks are still made in their trademark psycho-folk style — with acoustic guitars, sprinkly chimes, falsettos, criss-crossed vocal harmonies, and a certain sentimental elegance; I mainly refer to ʽScreensʼ and ʽWorkingʼ here; plus, Beach Boys-like harmonies additionally crop up from time to time, for instance, on the closing track (ʽWhat Happened?ʼ). Atmospheric and re­specting the legacy of Pavillion, but nowhere near as memorable as the best stuff on their «main­stream masterpiece», they do an important job — providing some relief from all the weirdness — but they are not what ODDSAC is really about.

But what is it about? Overcrowding, I guess. With all the jungly overdubs, all the animalistic and totemistic vocalizing tracks, all the tribal beats and nature sounds, ODDSAC is probably their best attempt, so far, to emulate the living soul of a parallel universe. Not a sci-fi universe, mind you, of the kind usually preferred by their colleagues in the electronic department — quite an or­ganic one, with busy street life (ʽMr. Fingersʼ), ghosts spooking lonely wanderers in the woods (ʽSatin Orb Washʼ), collective celebrations on feast days (ʽTantrum Barbʼ), large swamps spew­ing out poisonous, hallucinogenic fumes (ʽLady On The Lakeʼ), and whatever else you'd like to extract from your own mind to substitute Danny Perez's unnecessary fantasies.

Even the album's lonesome attempt at emulating an «industrial» mood (ʽUrban Cremeʼ) never attains the icy, mercyless, robotic cold of, say, Autechre, as the busy, static sonics of functioning equipment are still accompanied by «organic» sounds. Scary robotic equipment can never be that scary when it is humming, beeping, and clanging against a background of chirping birds and croa­king frogs. Or, to be more precise, of chirping-croaking frogbirds, because the world of AC is full of non-trivial species whose evolution path followed the same individual mutations as the brain cells of Avey Tare and Panda Bear.

What makes this stuff better than, for instance, Here Comes The Indian (this early AC release is probably the closest in spirit to ODDSAC) is — apart from extra complexity, improved pro­duction, and shorter length of the individual tracks, all of which helps — the fact that in between the two, there was Merriweather Post Pavillion, a demarcation line, having crossed which the band could never really be the same again. Yes, they are making a different album here, but they are not fascistic purists, and they retain all the gained experience, and this concerns not just the lovely vocal harmonies, but also the use of «light» electronic tones — chiming, jingling, sprink­ling, such as the sonic kaleidoscope of ʽMess Your Houseʼ, a track that is way too chaotic to fully match my tastes, but still sounds bright and optimistic, even despite all the jarring explosions and screams with which it is bombarded on a regular basis.

My only — minor, but real — disappointment is that, to a large extent, all of this stuff is some­how «nostalgic». It's as if they have grown up, matured, learned a lot, and now are returning back to base to «do it all over again» from scratch, so that you can now throw away all of their pre-Sung Tongs records and replace them with ODDSAC. But then again, who am I to com­plain?... seeing as how I am pretty much doing the same thing with my own reviews. Thumbs up, that much at least is for certain.

Check "ODDSAC" (DVD) on Amazon

Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: FALL BE KIND (2009)

1) Graze; 2) What Would I Want? Sky; 3) Bleed; 4) On A Highway; 5) I Think I Can.

While not the first Animal Collective EP to contain original material, Fall Be Kind was the first one to cross over the 25-minute mark and cautiously approach LP length level, meaning that it probably merits a few words of its own.

Strictly formally, this is not much of an «advance» on their previous record. Now that they'd fi­nally found the perfect middle ground between psychedelia, hooliganry, and pop, they are stick­ing to it, and my best guess is they will probably keep sticking to it, provided they do not want to regress back to «cult phenomenon» status. But this time around it truly looks as if they are running quite high on confidence, too — there is a certain «now we do know what we are doing» whiff round all this.

'Graze' opens the proceedings with such an intense celestial sound that it comes across as some sort of Heavenly Overture, and the whole twenty-eight minute experience can be conveniently assigned to the genre of «Electronic Oratorio» (as opposed to «Electronic Symphony» of the previous outing — with the emphasis on religious connotations, of course). "Let me begin", the vocals come in, "feels good 'cause it's early, ease open my eyes and let light in". Who wrote these lyrics — Jon Anderson? In­deed, there are quite a few lyrical and musical parallels with the classic, idealistic prog-rock style that can be suggested. Condense Tales From Topographic Oceans into one half-hour, cut out most of the soloing wankery, replace most instruments with electronic gadgets, add a small chunk of Beach Boys harmonies, a little tinge of the Frisco spirit (one of the songs actually samples the Grateful Dead), and there you are.

Besides, we now know exactly what these guys want — just refer to the title of track No. 2. We probably knew it at least as far back as Sung Tongs, but it is possible that they did not know it back then. The EP is an intentional statement of purpose: what used to be groping around in the dark, testing the aural effects of each of the miriad of new sonic waves they were able to synthe­size, has finally paid off, and now they are pushing forward this new brand of musical religion. Celestial sound tones, trance-inducing rhythms, ever more complicated choir overdubs to give you a definite feeling of floating in the stratosphere with them angels swooping up and down and left and right all around you, and lyrics that make about as much sense as they used to but are gi­ven a more and more «sanctified» coating.

This brings us back to the old question of whether these guys have, or if they did not have, whe­ther they have managed to finally find, «soul» — or, to put it differently, are they still putting us on with this grand, but meaningless, spectacle or have the sounds that they are putting out ended up converting them, too? If someone like myself is still unable to fall under their spell — fully able to appreciate the complexity and excitement of what they are doing, but unable to experience anything even remotely close to a cathartic emotion — does that mean they are still doing some­thing wrong, or is it just me? Or could it be that the pointless hooliganry of their early period has shut off my receptacles, so that even if they become the Bach Collective in a few years, the whole thing will still ring somewhat hollow and artificial?

Not clear. Whatever be, it is certain that Fall Be Kind is one of their most accessible creations, and that if its loops, rings, bells, chorals, and words do not exercise their magic on you, it is no use even trying to bother working your way back through the catalog. Thumbs up out of sheer amazement at how firmly they have established their own Church of Heaven, but I do not think I am quite ready to subscribe as of yet.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION (2009)

1) In The Flowers; 2) My Girls; 3) Also Frightened; 4) Summertime Clothes; 5) Daily Routine; 6) Bluish; 7) Guys Eyes; 8) Taste; 9) Lion In A Coma; 10) No More Runnin'; 11) Brother Sport.

One decade of fooling around, and here is the payoff: Merriweather Post Pavilion put the Ani­mal Collective in the big league, not only prompting rave reviews on the part of every respectable penname, but even climbing surprisingly high up the charts, perhaps on the strength of these re­views. Perhaps the most surprising element, though, is how they managed to do it unaccompanied by irate cries of "sell out" from their dedicated guard of honour.

There are some important technical differences from Strawberry Jam. All of it was written and recorded in the absence of Deakin, the band's primary guitarist, so that samplers are on the move again and the album has much more of an "electronic symphony" feel to it than its predecessor. On the other hand, the band continues to raise the bar on their production values — this is, I think, the album on which the last traces of the "homebrewn" atmosphere have been erased. Welcome to the professional world.

But then there is an even bigger break: Pavilion also continues the trend of transforming the out­fit from a pack of weird fairytale goofballs into a team of super-serious Messengers, equipped with a serious claim. What that claim is, I am not sure; perhaps it does not even exist, because these days it is doggone hard to distinguish real Messengers from phoney ones. However, even if they are phonies, they now know how to do a pretty good job of faking it.

My biggest problem with Strawberry Jam was the lack of soul; maybe their own problem was similar, because on Pavilion, it looks like they are actively searching for it, even if they may not necessarily have found it. Whatever the answer, their vision of "soul" includes adding the follo­wing elements: (a) ever-increasing production depth — "soul" implies an impression of being hid under a bunch of layers, and you get a better chance of conveying "soul" if you sound like you're playing out of the bottom of a well than if you're diddling on your listener's front porch; (b) ever improving vocal arrangements — now they're openly quoting the Beach Boys' moves (listen to the 'then we could be dancing / no more missing you while I'm gone' passage on the opening track... sound familiar?) and, even when they are not, they still leave behind the scent of Brian Wilson's trail to spiritual enlightenment; (c) including more and more "catchy" and "accessible" melodic elements in many of their songs — the "hit number" 'My Girls' is practically hummable, and the chorus to 'Bluish' ('Put on the dress that I like...') is hummable and gorgeous; (d) injecting more sense — or, at least, pretending to inject more sense — into the lyrics, so that professional reviewers like Mark Richardson of Pitchforkmedia can come up with ultra-meaningful conclusi­ons like (I quote) 'the words reinforce the sense of vulnerability that cuts through the music, and wind up being an essential component on an album that oozes confidence from every pore'.

Shiver me timbers, I have no idea how you can combine 'vulnerability' with 'confidence' in the exact same spot, but then one thing has certainly not changed for the Animal Collective: they still make it one of their major goals to confuse their audiences, especially confuse them into writing assessments of their music whose meaninglessness increases in direct proportion to their assumed seriousness. So let us not hold it against Mark Richardson who is, I am sure of that, writing from the very depths of his heart. It's just that they have been confused, these depths.

In more simple terms, Merriweather Post Pavilion has some beautiful pop melodies ('Bluish'), some inspiring martial melodies ('Summertime Clothes'), some head-spinning atmospheric melo­dies ('No More Runnin'), and some disturbingly pretentious statement songs ('My Girls') that rail against 'fancy things' and 'social status', for the first time ever establishing the band's socio-po­li­ti­cal creed and providing the indie community with one of the decade's loudest anthems. If you can stand all the tape loops and the relatively monotonous style of vocal arrangements, Pavilion may even seem to be their most diverse record, although the quintessence behind all the songs is really the same, and the effect of "kaleidoscopic rainbow" is being generated more or less equally by all of its individual tracks.

Whether that rainbow is a real one or made out of plastic is something I have not been able to un­derstand, even on my own personal level — the album has grown much upon me since the first listen, but I am still not ready to accept the same warmth I used to get from 'good, good, good, good vibrations' from 'open up your, open up your, open up your throat' ('Brother Sport'), and it is not just the lyrics — it is still the same nagging feeling that, for Panda Bear and Avey Tare, form comes first and substance comes next, if it comes at all.

One thing is for certain: no matter how much critical praise, or even commercial success, is awarded to Pavilion today, it will never do the same thing for its generation that Pet Sounds did for theirs — for one simple reason: only a small handful of people will be able to sincerely react to it on the same level that a lot of people were able to react to Brian Wilson's teenage sympho­nies half a century before. And even if this small handful of people represents the sharpest and brightest minds of their generation (how do we know, though?), this would only mean that their elitist asses will be kicked into the dust pretty soon. And anyway, I do not want to live in a world where the highest standard of "art" is represented by Merriweather Post Pavilion any more than I want to live in a world where Taylor Swift stays at the top of the charts for over a month.

In short, my intellect's response to the album is a thumbs up, my heart's response is predictably con­fused, and my overall feeling, upon re-reading the review, seems somewhat suicidal. But I sus­pect that is exactly the kind of reaction that the Animal Collective wanted to extract from me.

Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: STRAWBERRY JAM (2007)

1) Peacebone; 2) Unsolved Mysteries; 3) Chores; 4) For Reverend Green; 5) Fireworks; 6) #1; 7) Winter Wonder Land; 8) Cuckoo Cuckoo; 9) Derek.

You know you're in for a special treat when the album you're listening to is known to draw its in­spiration from a strawberry jam packet included in a tray of airplane food — at least, according to Panda Bear's account of it. So many thoughts spring up so immediately. For instance, like any normal human being, I get the urge to throw up at the very idea of airplane food, much more so at the idea of a music record inspired by airplane food. On the other hand, I admit that strawberry jam is just about the most eatable thing out of all the orcish variety of airplane food, and it's a big relief to know that the album wasn't at least inspired by tasteless bread rolls or cashew nuts. Ne­vertheless, the album cover does make me want to throw up.

Strawberry Jam is a big progression over Sung Tongs and Feels — it is the first record on which the band really takes advantage of sophisticated production values, adding so much depth and scope to their sound that, in the eyes of "quality sound aficionados", it might as well be the band's first proper album as such. They are also slowly, but steadily drifting more and more into the realms of conventional songwriting — oh, nothing to worry about, ye goofballs and whackos all over the world, because they were so far away from it when they started out it will probably take them at least a couple more decades to become Phil Collins. For now, this is a pleasant "golden middle mix" of the experimental and the traditional.

With the addition of new sound layers and all, the Collective's general aim — revival of the Brian Wilson spirit for the new millennium — becomes even more obvious. How else can one explain these whirls of falsetto vocals clinging to baroque-tinged tape loops and bright shiny upbeat gui­tars? Almost every song on Strawberry Jam owes at least something, here and there, to the SMiLE sessions, from the rousing power pop opener 'Peacebone' to the hypnotizing "power folk" closer 'Derek'. This does not do much in the way of diversity — frankly speaking, even the mo­dest length of fourty three minutes wears me out somewhat — but it does generate a very consis­tent and convincing sonic kaleidoscope (sorry, could not resist using the word again).

There is nothing truly "bad" I could say about the album. It is respectful of tradition yet quite strikingly original, it has songs that carefully avoid cheap catchiness but slowly end up being in­terestingly memorable, it has HARD WORK AND SOLID CRAFT written in invisible ink on every square inch of it, it has enough musical ideas and twisted lyrics to merit deep philological and artistic analysis, and it has justifiedly earned glowing reviews from most alternative sour­ces and even a few mainstream ones.

At the same time, I cannot bring myself to love it. Feels worked better towards achieving that goal, and so, two years later, would Merriweather Post Pavilion; but as for Strawberry Jam, I cannot get rid of the feeling that the band's aim here was mostly to practice the new form rather than go for further nurturing of the spirit. The hooks feel hollow, the excitement feels forced, the whole experience has a decidedly post-modernist flavour that either kills emotion off the cuff or makes emotion physically undistinguishable from mock-emotion. And it is not contradictory that I should be mentioning this so late in discussing the Collective's career: if a record keeps continu­ously inviting comparisons with the Beach Boys, it is only fit to mention why it cannot, and should not, really function as a substitute for the Beach Boys.

'An obsession with the past is like a dead fly, and just a few things are related to the old times', they say in 'Peacebone', as if predicting the kind of reaction described in the previous paragraph — a pretty strong statement, considering that most of the things they do are, in fact, quite strongly related to the "old times". But, two lines later, what they say then is 'It's not my words that you should follow, it's your insides' — and here they are perfectly right. I follow my insides, and my insides tell me that either Strawberry Jam has no soul, or, if it has one, then I am way too old-timey and retarded to feel it.

And yet, in the final run, with all the wonderful creativity flowing through the record, it would be at the very least disrespectful to give it a thumbs down and, God forbid, maybe prevent some cu­rious seeker to test its charms on himself. Yes, at the very least, it is a total triumph of form, and, on that level, thumbs up are guaranteed. Let's face it: before these guys came along, nobody (at least, no one we regular Joes are aware of) ever dreamed of combining Terry Riley with Brian Wilson, and this means that new and exciting syntheses of ideas, if not exactly new and exciting ideas themselves, are still possible as late in humanity's development as The Pre-Apocalypse Pe­riod we happen to live in.

Animal Collective: Feels

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: FEELS (2005)

1) Did You See The Words; 2) Grass; 3) Flesh Canoe; 4) The Purple Bottle; 5) Bees; 6) Banshee Beat; 7) Daffy Duck; 8) Loch Raven; 9) Turn Into Something.

Maybe if you only want one Animal Collective album, Feels is the one to get. Maybe. Starting with Strawberry Jam, they would begin to bury themselves under deep, deep layers of kaleido­scopic sonic panzers, but on Feels you can still experience the band in plenty of intimate ways (and I mean that in the decent sense of the expression) — and, at the same time, still quite acces­sible and, might I suggest, even understandable.

Diehard fans of the band may think of 'Did You See The Words' and 'Grass' as way too simplistic and mass-marketed, betraying the unsigned agreement between Panda Bear, Avey Tare and those select few that actually paid them money for their early releases. I prefer, on the other hand, to view all of their earlier career as a preparatory stage for these quirky psycho-pop masterpieces. What I see and feel here is real sunshine-soaked joy, filtered through a crazy impressionistic me­chanism but totally sincere in its essence. The lyrics, as usual, make no sense, but once lines like 'there's something living in these lines' and 'there's something starting, don't know why' are deli­vered, there is an odd "brand new day" kind of feeling — obviously, sharpened by the bright, upbeat melody, the steady rhythmic build-up, and the glimmering production — that can fill you up with optimism if you just lower the deflector shields for one moment.

But this is no longer whacko fairy-tale muzak like they used to do early on. This is a different kind of "light", not the kind I would recommend to play to kids: this is denser stuff, and more bent on creating solid musical background than just goofing off on a vocal basis. Certainly the sin­ging is still the central point of attraction: songs on which there are no solid vocal hooks are only half as good as those songs on which they continue to invoke the spirit of Brian Wilson circa 1967. But even when they're only half good, they still make sense — after the initial blast of ener­gy, the album gradually sinks into foggy trance, inviting you to trip along, swooning hazily to the trills and chills of 'Bees' and 'Daffy Duck'.

Actually, the best comparison I can make of this new ambient side of theirs is to the early Grate­ful Dead (around the Anthem Of The Sun period), but they're better, because they sing better than the Grateful Dead, and the sound is quite a bit richer than the Dead's (well, this is the 21st century, after all). There is a great, respectable sense of balance on these tracks — neither too mi­nimalistic to become boring, nor too overproduced to become disorienting. Some atmospheric keyboard background, some gentle raga-like guitar strumming, and a general supernatural feel to the proceedings that may have something to do with the odd tuning of all the instruments (band members later confessed they tuned everything around some original loops recorded from a «naturally de-tuned» old piano).

Feels is, indeed, one excellent title for the album, all consisting of a bunch of "feels" — and at least one or two of them are probably guaranteed to fall in line with your own. (I'm not speaking here of the upbeat material, restricted to the first two songs and 'Purple Bottle'; this kind of mate­rial, I'm sure, will be pleasing to everyone who has gotten, in his or her life, past the stage of cal­ling things "annoying"). For me, the best of these "feels" is 'Bees', with its tender vocal cascades and deep piano rumble and harp-like strumming. For you, may be anything else. Other "feels" — most of the second half of the album, in fact — leave me in a relatively cold state, but I am not complaining, at least, not the brain part of me, which has, early on, claimed the right to declare a thumbs up state while the heart was still undecisive. Yet, with the added support of the life-affir­ming beauty of 'Did You See The Words' and 'Grass', the decision holds up pretty well, and the album, along with Sung Tongs, means the peak of this band for me.

Animal Collective: Sung Tongs

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: SUNG TONGS (2004)

1) Leaf House; 2) Who Could Win A Rabbit; 3) The Softest Voice; 4) Winters Love; 5) Kids On Holiday; 6) Sweet Road; 7) Visiting Friends; 8) College; 9) We Tigers; 10) Mouth Wooed Her; 11) Good Lovin' Outside; 12) Whaddit I Done.

Finally, the state of Grace has been attained. Sung Tongs is, almost inarguably so, the Animal Collective at their most accessible (which is still pretty darn inaccessible) — and, coincidentally, the one album on which they finally demonstrate the purpose of their very existence.

Unlike Indian, it is not at all heavy on special effects; many of the tracks are almost completely acoustic, with light, bright melodies that hearken back to the psycho-folk of Spirit. One big dis­tinction is the production: despite the fact that, just as usual, all the songs were recorded in, shall we say, clinically non-sterile conditions, the "lo-fi feel" is completely missing, making me think that the filthy sonic hooliganry of Campfire Songs was, in fact, perfectly intentional.

But, most importantly, the thing that really matters is the singing. To appreciate this, I think one must forget the gimmickry, the weirdness, the musical minimalism, and concentrate on the man­ner in which Avey Tare and Panda Bear weave their waves — best exemplified on the opening track, 'Leaf House'. This time, I know what this reminds me of: the Incredible String Band, at their psycho peak in 1967-68. But the Animal Collective have set themselves the brave task of outdoing their gurus, and in a sense, a technical one at least, they succeed: the up and down and out of town undulations of their speech signals are unlike anything I've ever heard. They're nei­ther heavenly, like with the Cocteau Twins, nor scary, like with your average Siberian shaman; nei­ther ugly, like with Yoko Ono, nor beautiful, like with Tim Buckley. What are they?

I am not talking here about the album's low points, mind you, which it still possesses. From time to time the duo seems to be wanting to hypnotize us in the old way — blubbering and grumbling over an endless repetition of two chords (twelve minutes worth of 'Visiting Friends'), or simply letting what starts off as a cute moment of tenderness evolve into seven minutes of boredom ('The Softest Voice' — indeed, and not necessarily a bonus). But everything must be forgiven with 'Kids On Holiday', which plows on ahead on the strength of the same two chords, yet within a vocal setting that will twirl your head until it falls off.

In short, the old modus operandi — combining the psychedelic with the child-like — has come back with a vengeance. 'You don't have to go to college', goes the lone lyrical line on 'College', and, sure, why should you? Going to college requires killing off, or at least restraining your inner child, and there's no liking Sung Tongs without releasing the inner child. I cannot imagine any­one who does not have a streak of Peter Pan within, or Tinker Bell at least, to get a kick out of all the wah-wah-wahs on 'Whaddit I Done' (but I refuse to let the truth out about whether I get a kick out of it or not).

Actually, at the risk of sounding completely off my rocker, I'd say that the best possible audience for Sung Tongs would be a kiddie one — that a three-year old, under the right circumstances, would get more out of it than any adolescent or adult raised on "proper" music. Some might want to extrapolate this over just about any avantgarde piece of art, but I doubt if a typical three-year old could be enticed with Ornette Coleman or Throbbing Gristle; Sung Tongs, to me, sound like the perfect non-ordinary soundtrack for the non-ordinary mind of the youngster whose speech mechanisms have not yet become fully separate from his musical mechanisms. If you have a tod­d­­ler, try it out. It can do no harm, can it?

For all the lovely, unpredictable, and amazingly complex vocal work, these Beach Boys on acid and lollipops get an unquestionable thumbs up from the terrified brain department. Obviously, the heart must keep quiet; not being a three-year old, a mental patient, a ganja lover, or The Man Who Came To Earth, I don't "love" this record and I never will. But some of us here on Earth do happen to be Flying Spaghetti Monsters in denial, so I am not rejecting the possibility of at least a certain amount of mature organic matter dripping real feeling for Sung Tongs.

Animal Collective: Here Comes The Indian

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: HERE COMES THE INDIAN (2003)

1) Native Belle; 2) Hey Light; 3) Infant Dressing Table; 4) Panic; 5) Two Sails On A Sound; 6) Slippi; 7) Too Soon.

When trying to appreciate total freak-out pieces of "music", the important thing is whether your mind is able to attach any kind of coherent picture to any of them. The sound of the Animal Col­lective can generally be described as "kaleidoscopic", but kaleidoscopes eventually — in fact, pretty soon — become tremendously boring in their predictable unpredictability, and instead of the usual chaotic glimmer and glow you begin to yearn for more precise imagery.

Here Comes The Indian seems to be the first truly "focused" album by the band, or, at least, the first after their psycho-fairy style debut effort. Maybe it is no coincidence that it is also the first record officially credited to "The Animal Collective" — as opposed to earlier efforts which just listed the members by name, as if each were doing his thing without giving a damn about whether it fit in with what the others were churning out at the same time or not. Of course, from a "melo­dic" or "harmonic" point of view, it is still utter crap. But there are signs of change and, perhaps, even growing up without killing off the child within.

Basically, Here Comes The Indian just happens to match its title. In small parts, it even reminds me of such classic "tribalistic" efforts as the Residents' Eskimo: filtering the essence of native, shamanistic harmonies through the avantgarde minds of thoroughly modern meta-artists. Except, of course, that the Animal Collective, with their limited means of existence and, perhaps, a some­what shallow­er view of "authenticity", are not interested in mixing real Indian motives with their electrononsense, but are fully content with their own take on "The Indian". But that's OK, we can forgive them for that. There's too much unnecessary "authenticity" in the world these days anyway — why not replace it with fantasy from time to time?

All seven tracks represent "aggressively ambient" sonic panoramas, captured in much better qua­lity than Campfire Songs (even though it still took them about three days in total to do this), and most of them can indeed be viewed as representing various tribal activities — war dances around the campfire, ritual chanting while harvesting the crops, and even the sonic equivalent of a fero­cious brave attack ('Panic'). Wedged in between are all sorts of nature panoramas — superficially peaceful, but loaded with potential danger. Only one track, 'Slippi', might even be called a "song", but it's short, overproduced, and so full of tribalism like the others that it might take you a long time before you start calling it that.

I felt more depth, diversity, and excitement in this record than in all of the AC's previous efforts put together (yes, including even Spirit), and not because there really is more depth and diversity — primarily because there is a sense of purpose which lets me through the veils to experience the depth and diversity. I cannot say I like it, of course: it does nothing to sharpen my basic emotions. But there is something formally grand about it; in fact, when you think all of its paintings were recorded in three days, in all their complexity, it's hard not to harbour any respect for the band. The intellectual part of me, therefore, calls for a decisive thumbs up — first time! — even as the heart still refuses to budge. But, let's face it, even if it is shit, it's a kind of shit that at least deser­ves to be heard.

Animal Collective: Campfire Songs

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: CAMPFIRE SONGS (2003)

1) Queen In My Pictures; 2) Doggy; 3) Two Corvettes; 4) Moo Rah Rah Rain; 5) De Soto De Son.

One thing is absolutely impossible to deny about the Animal Collective (by the way, on this al­bum they are still not the Animal Collective — in fact, here they have no name whatsoever): they certainly know how to make the same authentic, organic crap in a whole lot of different ways. Like its two predecessors, Campfire Songs is proverbially unlistenable, but it's an entirely other style of unlistenable. Which, for a brief while, even makes things exciting!

The players are Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and new band member Deakin (Josh Dibb in the alterna­tive universe of The Establishment), whereas Geologist's talents are only used to operate the three Sony MiniDisc players that were employed to record the album. The only discernible instruments are acoustic guitars, around which the "Animals" weave a complex web of dreamy, repetitive singing. The finishing touch is the environment — all the recordings, done in one take, were "authentically" made on a screen porch, with chunks of "nature noises" also captured separately and then spliced together with the playing and singing. "Campfire Songs" indeed.

From a technical viewpoint, the vocal harmonies are the only thing worth praising. Already on the first album it was clear that Avey Tare and Panda Bear have a serious thing for the Beach Boys, which they like to combine with extra psychedelic punches. The fact that they're able to construct such tight, on-key harmonies while sitting on a porch is admirable, and, under different circumstances, I can imagine myself falling under this type of spell — even despite the piss-poor instrumentation (boring guitar drone that, at its best, somewhat recalls early Tyrannosaurus Rex, and, at its worst, sounds like something a four-year old with half a musical ear could beat out if he found a mysterious piece of hollowed out wood with six nylon strings attached in the closet). In fact, I think the album is at its questionable best when the guitar fades away completely and we are left with nothing but the hypnotic acappella sounds.

Unfortunately, the lower-than-lo-fi production completely kills it off for me. Spontaneity and au­thenticity is one thing, and awful recording quality is another. If these mantras were given a solid "brushing up", some part of them at least could have made a cute psychedelic experience in the tradition of Skip Spence and Tim Buckley. But when it all sounds like fortuitously captured trans­missions from a World War II-era receiver, that part of the mind which is responsible for relaxa­tion and tuning in to the Eternal enters into violent conflict with that other part of the mind which is responsible for intellectual decoding of received signals and separation of noise from informa­tion. Results are about as dreadful as combining pills with alcohol.

Not that this wasn't the purpose, of course, but it is hardly funny when talented people intentio­nally sacrifice their talents for the sake of making it into the Guinness Book of Weirdness. It may be respectable, especially considering that with each passing year, it becomes ever and ever more hard to actually make it (and the Animal Collective are one of the very few collectives that have a good chance); but it is not enjoyable at all. From a rational point of view, Campfire Songs is yet another album that sounds like nothing else, but in this matter, I'd rather cling to the irrational, which suggests that it is, in fact, bull-de-luxe, and since it so clearly begs for a thumbs down, I'll bite and award it with one.

Animal Collective: Hollinndagain

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: HOLLINNDAGAIN (2002)

1) I See You Pan/Pride And Fight; 2) Forest Gospel/There's An Arrow/Lablakely Dress.

This is a live album, credited originally to Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist, and my take on it will be quite short. There are people who live and die for this, and there are people that Nature has rendered unable to get it. I belong to the latter group, and, therefore, feel justified to exercise my freedom of speech and label this a bunch of messy, ugly, unlistenable noise, far more «pre­tentious» in the direct sense of the word than, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans — at least the old proggers could play their instruments. (Well, truth be told, Panda Bear does know how to drum. But this hardly makes me feel any better).

The only ray of light is that today, the world knows the Animal Collective can do much better than this. But did the world know it in 2002? In short, there ain't enough thumbs in the world to let you know just how «down» I'm feeling about this record.

Animal Collective: Danse Manatee

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: DANSE MANATEE (2001)

1) A Manatee Dance; 2) Penguin Penguin; 3) Another White Singer (Little White Glove); 4) Essplode; 5) Meet The Light Child; 6) Runnin The Round Ball; 6) Bad Crumbs; 7) The Living Toys; 8) Throwin The Round Ball; 9) Ahhh Good Country; 10) Lablakely Dress; 11) In The Singing Box.

On their second album, the future Animal Collective are already a trio, adding "Geologist" (Brian Weitz) on extra keyboards. Since Geologist has gone on record saying that Danse Manatee is his favourite album from the team, I'm going to imply that the shift in sound from Spirit to what we have here has a lot to do with his honourable presence; but it isn't going to change my opinion on the record, which isn't exactly sugar and spice.

Spirit — like all seriously notable records by the band, be they good or bad — regardless of whe­ther you like it or not, mixed fairy-tale fantasy with avantgarde in a way that could be annoying and curious at the same time. But the basic idea behind Manatee is different; it's not "let us filter our child fancies through a net of electronic devices", but rather "let us filter whatever comes into our heads at any given moment through a net of electronic devices, utilizing the most astounding and unusual sounds we can produce in our bedroom". And, since in the best of both worlds the most astounding and unusual sounds are also, quite frequently, the most unlistenable ones, the results are predictable. They're also more boring than they used to be.

There's not even the tiniest ounce of melody; worse, there's not even the tiniest ounce of captiva­ting atmosphere. There's a lot of pssh-pssh noises, and a lot of brrr-brrr noises, and a lot of jing-whee-fjjjrr-kllllng-wshwshwsh-pooka-pooka noises, and, of course, plenty of stuff to make your dog wish for stronger animal protection laws to be enforced on its owner. Sometimes they try to sing over it, but it doesn't help matters much, because they have these high frequencies all over the place that make it feel like you're listening to painfully low-quality MP3 recordings, and, instead of tuning in on the vocals, I just tune in to my subconscious desire to rip all that torturous whistling and wheezing out of the track.

Granted, all of this is slightly more diverse than Metal Machine Music, but it doesn't have a much larger point, either, belonging to the same category of artistic statement. The only redee­ming quality is Panda Bear's percussion work, in the good old avantgarde tradition of all the King Crimson drummers and suchlike; if not for that, there would hardly be anything here that would distinguish the results from, I'm guessing, millions of crazyass experimental recordings done by millions of kids in their millions of bedrooms all over the world. Nevertheless, if you are into extreme frequencies — for instance, if you believe that God abides in extreme frequencies, and the only way to get close to God is to attune your ears to the unattunable — Danse Manatee may be a revelation. But I rather prefer to think that God abides in 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da', so, unsur­prisingly, this one gets a thumbs down without thinking thrice.

Animal Collective: Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: SPIRIT THEY'RE GONE, SPIRIT THEY'VE VANISHED (2000)

1) Spirit They've Vanished; 2) April And The Phantom; 3) Untitled; 4) Penny Dreadfuls; 5) Chocolate Girl; 6) Everyone Whistling; 7) La Rapet; 8) Bat You'll Fly; 9) Someday I'll Grow To Be As Tall As The Giant; 10) Alvin Row.

The story of what we know today as the «Animal Collective» formally begins with this home­brewn recording, featuring Avey Tare (David Portner) on everything except percussion, on the latter featuring Panda Bear (Noah Lennox). No need to be afraid of the «homebrewn» label: we have come a long way since the dawn of techno­logy, and it all sounds fantastically good for something recorded directly in a living room. Well, actually, the vocals sound like shit, but presu­mably that was the idea, or close to the idea.

Since, for the first few years of the team's recording career, Spirit was only available in a two-digit number of copies (perhaps three, but given the world's overall population, that's hardly a significant difference), "important people" only started admiring its quality in retrospect, but the retrospect turned out to be fortunate: most indie bands, no matter how respectable they become eventually, only wish their initial, pre-big label, efforts got the same amount of admiration.

What is it that makes this recording important in any way, or simply interesting? As much as I'm left indifferent by it, I can't deny that I haven't heard anything like it before. The best way to de­scribe the genre in which it is cast — or, in fact, which it creates — is arguably "Psychedelic Avantgarde For Kiddies", where "avantgarde" stands for "weirdass unpredictable rhythms and chord changes", "psychedelic" for "trippy effects furnished by the latest in electronic gadgets", and "kiddies" for "an overall feeling of almost overdone furry cuteness all over this thing".

Obviously, each of the three directions can be found separately on any number of albums by any number of artists from the last five decades, but to combine all three the way A. T. and P. B. have judged them to be combinable — something fairly unique in here. Many people, even seasoned listeners, will be left dazed and confused by these sounds, uncertain whether this really means anything and whether music like that has any future. And this, I think, is an excellent thing in it­self, because these days, too few things exist that can daze and confuse any more.

The magic does not work on me; I find that the "cuteness" clashes with the "avantgardism" angle in a way that sort of flattens both. I'd gather that all of these playful polyrhythms saddled with fairish vocals, all of these innocent nature sounds interwoven with jazz modulations, all of these 'Chocolate Girl' and 'April And The Phantom' song titles mixed with ear-splitting sounds and mind-defying lyrics pretty much kill off each other's effect. Kids won't like this unless they were born and raised in nuthouses, and elitists may scoff at the cuteness aspect. To truly "get into this", you probably have to be an archi-arrogant hipster with a subconscious need to release and satisfy your inner child — a category of people that must be about as rare as Jewish Neo-nazis (but since we know for a fact that Jewish Neo-nazis exist, so should childlike avantgardists).

Individual songs do not matter at all; it's probably more correct to perceive all of the album's sixty minutes as one continuous suite, written for the purposes of exploding your mind rather than in­graining itself into it. Even after four listens I still haven't been able to decompose these sixty minutes — not a single moment stands out as particularly inspiring, particularly catchy, particu­larly ugly, or particularly out-of-place. It's as if someone were evenly and meticulously shaking the same sonic kaleidoscope, letting you in on an endlessly shifting array of glistening dots and bits but never allowing you to focus in on any one single configuration; in the end, you're dazzled with what you've just seen but you also find it hard to explain what it is that you have just seen. In my case at least, you're also not quite certain about whether the things you have just seen have any actual meaning, and whether, in fact, there was any necessity in seeing them in the first place.

One definite complaint I'd like to voice, though, is that these sonic textures lack any sort of depth. I mentioned that the recording does not suffer from the usual problems associated with lo-fi, but nevertheless, all the tunes might have benefited from professional studio production. In the past, bands like Amon Düül II or the Cocteau Twins would drag you into their fantasy worlds because they really felt like three-dimensional worlds; Avey Tare and Panda Bear do not really go beyond the second dimension, and it feels like you're merely walking on the pages of their book of fairy tales, not diving into it — and the primary fault lies not with their composing skills or the strength of their imagination, but with the poorness of their technical capacities. It is still amazing how much they managed to accomplish within the four walls of their living room, but it is not enough to turn this living room into a flying saucer on chicken legs, if you know what I mean.

It is mostly because of this — implying that this obstacle was at least somewhat overcome as the years went by — that the record receives a thumbs down, following a repulsive reaction from the heart that overrides the positive logical argumentation of the brain. If this were the only Animal Collective album ever recorded, some reconsideration might be in order, but this is, after all, a living-room quality recording by two well-meaning, but still relatively unexperienced whackos that went on to bigger and better things. And I don't think this is the best place to start your acquaintance with them, unless you just live for the challenge.