Animal Collective

Lineup: Avey Tare: guitar, vocals. Panda Bear: percussion, vocals. Geologist: minidiscs, vocals, starting with Danse Manatee. Deakin: guitar, vocals, starting with Here Comes the Indian. Plus, everyone produces all sorts of crazy sounds by various means not mentioned here.

SPIRIT THEY’VE GONE, SPIRIT THEY’VE VANISHED

by Avey Tare & Panda Bear; 2001; Rating: 2.52/pi

Composition: + / Lyrics: + / Production: + / Innovation: ++

• 01 Spirit They’ve Vanished [A−]
• 02 April and the Phantom [A−]
• 03 [A]
• 04 Penny Dreadfuls [B+]
• 05 Chocolate Girl [A+]
• 06 Everyone Whistling [i]
• 07 La Rapet [B+]
• 08 Bat You’ll Fly [B+]
• 09 Someday I’ll Grow to Be as Tall as the Giant [B+]
• 10 Alvin Row [A]

This is a prime example of a young band with a million ideas and absolutely no self-discipline. Thankfully, the result is a glorious mess rather than just a mess—see the next review for an example of how this approach can go tragically wrong.

Here and now, though, we’re talking about a remarkably successful album that succeeds most when it’s at its most ambitious—as on the repective 8- and 12-minute fairyland folk-pop epics “Chocolate Girl” and “Alvin Row”. The general lyrical thrust seems to concern that awkward border period between childhood and adulthood. “Chocolate Girl” detail’s a young lady’s sexual awakening, while “April and the Phantom” covers the death of a pet cat. Others are more, uh, esoteric. I’ll leave a more complete set of interpretations to others. Suffice it to say, a lot of regression has gone into the making of this album.

The band covers plenty of ground, from the screeching noise-dream-pop of the title track to the untitled third track, a guitar solo that hints at the long drones to come later. But the basic sound of the album is a shiny folky synth wonderland punctuated by random explosions of noise and piano and “perfect percussion”, as Panda Bear is credited in the liner notes. There ain’t much in the way of traditional pop song structures to be found here, but the songs are loaded with charming melodies amidst the chaos.

Occasionally the band lingers too long in one place, resulting in a slightly excessive 60 minute running time. Hey, if we’re being asked to go back to the age of 11, we damn well need music to match our reduced attention spans! Still, this is about as good as could be reasonably expected from a band so young—or is that so old?

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DANSE MANATEE

by Avey Tare, Panda Bear, & Geologist; 2002; Rating: 1.88/pi

Composition: − / Lyrics: ~ / Production: + / Innovation: ++

• 01 A Manatee Dance [B−]
• 02 Penguin Penguin [C+]
• 03 Another White Singer(Little White Singer) [A−]
• 04 Essplode [A−]
• 05 Meet the Light Child [C+]
• 06 Runnin the Round Ball [A−]
• 07 Bad Crumbs [B+]
• 08 The Living Toys [B+]
• 09 Throwin the Round Ball [A−]
• 10 Ahhh Good Country [B+]
• 11 Loblakely Dress [B−]
• 12 In the Singing Box [B+]

Whenever a record review is based around a Freudian psychoanalysis of the band, you know that something somewhere along the way has gone horribly wrong. But that’s just one reaction I’ve encountered to this befuddling record.

In retrospect, it’s clear that this is a transitional album, bridging the gulf between the fairyland pop of the debut and the dense avant-rock of Here Comes the Indian. But its pop wreckage is never as pretty, nor its drones as entrancing. Instead, it’s a half-formed blend that doesn’t quite holds together. It also openly courts critical contempt with twee song titles like “Essplode” and “Penguin Penguin”. In short, it was a wise decision by the band to reissue this only as a free bonus disc to the previous album.

All that said, this is by no means an abject failure. Even if it sounds like a collection of outtakes, it has a certain wispy, cobbled-together charm of its own. But…yeah. Outtakes.

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HERE COMES THE INDIAN

2003; Rating: 2.84/pi

Composition: + / Lyrics: ~ / Production: ++ / Innovation: ++

• 01 Native Belle [A]
• 02 Hey Light [A−]
• 03 Infant Dressing Table [A]
• 04 Panic [A]
• 05 Two Sails on a Sound [A]
• 06 Slippi [A]
• 07 Too Soon [C+]

Some albums are destined, for a certain percentage of those who hear them, to be absolutely the most unlistenable thing that person has ever heard. This is one of those albums. Its victims? The parents, friends, children, significant others, and casual acquaintances of whoever buys it, of course. It’s hard to imagine many innocents stumbling upon it accidentally in a record store.

With this album, the band largely dispenses with the ‘pop’ song format of their previous work. Oh, sure, there are a couple song-like things wandering through here like sunspots, but the bulk of the running time here is taken up by long, densely layered drones, filled with high pitched electronic noises, clattering percussion, dizzy vocal outbursts, great greasy gobs of guitar, and other unnatural paraphernalia. None of these are exactly new to the band’s repertoire, but suddenly, they’ve all come together into something that sounds totally unlike what came before. To employ a dorky geological metaphor, all those heterogeneous bits of sediment of which the band was once comprised have reemerged from the Earth as pure, unstoppable molten lava. Even the occasional lyrics have been melted away into sheer texture, being almost totally incomprehensible.

If there’s one complaint I could lodge about this album, it’d be about the closing track, “Too Soon”, a sort of anti-drone with an incessant start/stop structure that quickly grows old. The rest, however, stays eternally youthful in the Animal Collective’s strange little gnarled, stunted Neverland.

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SUNG TONGS

2004; Rating: 2.82/pi

Composition: ++ / Lyrics: ~ / Production: ++ / Innovation: ++

• 01 Leaf House [A]
• 02 Who Could Win a Rabbit? [A+]
• 03 The Softest Voice [A−]
• 04 Winter’s Love [A]
• 05 Kids on Holiday [B]
• 06 Sweet Road [A]
• 07 Visiting Friends [A]
• 08 College [A−]
• 09 We Tigers [A]
• 10 Mouth Wooed Her [A−]
• 11 Good Lovin’ Outside [B+]
• 12 Whaddit I Done [C]

Proving that their Campfire Songs side project was more than just a dalliance with soft acoustic textures, Messrs. Tare and Bear return to their Collective moniker for 2004 stripped down to the essentials: a pair of acoustics, some things that make noise when you hit them, and the occasional odd sound effect. Oh, and vocals that are actually beginning to verge on Beach-Boys-esque…Okay, so it’s not that stripped down. Still, this is a huge departure from Indian, with the band relying mostly on mangled pop song structures and staying careful to make sounds that are pretty rather than ugly. The result is not their best album, but it may be the one least likely to cause friction between you and your family.

They do keep one long drone track as the epic centerpiece: “Visiting Friends” reprises the style of Campfire Songs but with a more studio-crafted, layered feel. It’s gorgeous if you’re the type who can stay awake for twelve minutes of dusty strumming and soft sheets of sonic fragments. If not, you can program it out of your CD player and still have a solid 40 minute album. Philistine.

Unfortunately, the band has not shed its penchant for ill-considered noodlings like the closing “Whaddit I Done”, and the album drops off a bit at the end once again. Still, while they continue to lack a fully-developed quality control mechanism, they’ve too many good ideas here to fail very often, and the best tracks here are absurdly fun.

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PROSPECT HUMMER EP

2005; Rating: 2.09/pi

Composition: ~ / Lyrics: + / Production: ++ / Innovation: +

• 01 It’s You [B]
• 02 Prospect Hummer [B]
• 03 Baleen Sample [B]
• 04 How to Dive [A]

It might seem like the perfect match: the avant-folk madmen of the Animal Collective reined in by veteran Vashti Bunyan’s twee 60s charm. Unfortunately, this short project doesn’t really get off the ground until the end. The first three tracks are rejects from the Sung Tongs sessions, and sound it. Vashti blends in a little too well with the band, sounding at times almost like Panda Bear’s falsetto. The third track is a decent but not particularly musical sound collage by Geologist. Ah, but the Right Hon. Ms. Bunyan takes over at the end to offer a sweet little melody about diving, with the Animals on backup. This is where the collaboration comes to fruition. All two minutes of it!

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FEELS

2005; Rating: 3.04/pi

Composition: ++ / Lyrics: + / Production: ++ / Innovation: ++

• 01 Did You See the Words? [A]
• 02 Grass [A−]
• 03 Flesh Canoe [B+]
• 04 The Purple Bottle [A+]
• 05 Bees [A−]
• 06 Banshee Beat [A]
• 07 Daffy Duck [B]
• 08 Loch Raven [A+]
• 09 Turn Into Something [A]

In some ways, this is the album that many fans have been waiting for. Partly it’s the return of sometimes-animals Deakin and Geologist, whose participation signals a reprise of the denser, rockinger sound of yore. But mainly it’s the songs themselves, which are longer and more developed, taking what would once have been brief flashes like “Sweet Road” and “Native Belle” and melding them to the group’s more expansive tendencies. Tracks like “Turn Into Something” (finally a worthy closing track!) and the avant–power ballad “Banshee Beat” are the closest they’ve come yet to reconciling all the contradictory impulses in their music in one swell foop. These tracks don’t merely hint at a bright future in the which the Collective forges its masterpiece—they’re pretty damn bright themselves. And may I say how refreshing it is for a formerly promising young band to actually fulfill their god damn promise?

The single “Grass” has earned the Collective a lot of ink, but it’s one of their less compelling tracks here. I spend more time with the multi-part love epic “Purple Bottle” (“Sometimes you hear me when others they can’t hear me / Hallelujah! / Sometimes I’m naked and thank God sometimes you’re naked!”) and the abominably pretty “Loch Raven”.

There remain wispy, near-rhythmless things like “Daffy Duck”, which aren’t exactly bad, but which don’t function on the same kinds of levels as the other tracks. At least on Campfire Songs these kinds of things existed on their own terms. Here, they’re rammed in between solid walls of pop music, where they stick out like a “Flesh Canoe”. But perhaps their brazenness at least makes them easier to round up and eliminate.

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