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ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: Beastreality
By Christopher R. Weingarten
Music, mythology and mayhem. Or, how it Feels to be Animal Collective
May 2007
Spoiler: show
"I met this girl outside a bar at seven in the morning," says Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, drummer of everywhere-via-rural Maryland noise-folk assemblage Animal Collective. "I got really drunk and wandered around. Puking."
Lennox and fellow Animal David Portner (a.k.a. Avey Tare) were touring through Europe as a duo in late 2003. They had a few days to kill in Lisbon after their final show, which Lennox used as an opportunity to wander off with a stranger.
"We weren't really hanging out much at the time," says Portner. "We needed some space. Our sound guy and his girlfriend were with us, so I lost them for a while, too. When I found them I was like, 'Have you seen Noah?'" Portner emphasizes the anxiety over his misplaced bandmate with a strained whisper. "I was just really paranoid. I was just eating, like, a lot of hash. I hate flying. It creates images of me dying and a lot of really weird imagery in my head. I just started getting paranoid and going 'Oh, man, where's Noah?' And Noah's just off getting laid!"
Lennox casually strolled up two hours before the flight, after Portner stayed awake all night worrying. Much later, Lennox ended up marrying the Portugal-born clothes designer who kept him out for days, eventually moving to Lisbon and becoming a dad. Needless to say, he's in good spirits.
Every Animal Collective record is a living extension of the group's atmosphere. Their free-associative, post-grad nursery rhymes are too cryptic to sanction much interpretation, and the band is too elusive to allow even the tiniest window into their free-psych psyches. All that's open for public viewing is the music: a teetering mess of childish exploration and adult apprehension, of crystalline Beach Boys harmonies and gritty cassette-traded noise experiments, of taut expressions of ecstasy and rambling meditations on melancholy. A bummer tour and a frayed group dynamic led to 2003's temperamental Here Comes The Indian, while newfound opportunity and exposure led to last year's triumphant Sung Tongs. Lennox's whirlwind relationship glow and Portner's brotherly affection are just two of the snuggly feelings the group says influenced their new album, Feels, the seventh record to bear the Animal Collective name. So, what type of record is it?
"The looove record," says Portner, with a smirk and the half-laugh of a navel-gazer.
The four members of Animal Collective—Lennox, Portner, Brian Weitz (a.k.a. Geologist) and Josh Dibb (a.k.a. Deakin)—sit in a wobbly semi-circle around a conference room table in the Caroline Distribution office, a not-uncommon habitat for hard-to-access artists with labor-intensive interview schedules. Just getting them there was a burden, considering they live in Lisbon, Brooklyn, D.C. and nowhere, respectively. The Collective have always preferred to remain cryptic, and have never done so many interviews for an album.
The lanky Dibb, with his barely-there mustache and a necklace as colorful as a string of Froot Loops, guards the back corner of the room, arms folded, playing sheriff of the Mystique Police. Whenever questions veer toward specifics of the Collective's creative process, he throws the seeker off the scent with a vague blanket statement, defusing every attempt to find a common thread in the album's nine songs.
On the record's underlying theme: "There's as many types of songs on the record as there are songs on the record."
On the Collective's general mood during recording: "They come from a pretty wide range of places. It's hard to pinpoint it."
On Lennox's personal life: "So, what were your thoughts on the record?"
For Dibb, Feels is a love letter to life. At 27, he's essentially doing what he's been setting out to do since high school. "Over the past year we've just been learning more and more about how to live in our world and make it be our own at the same time," he says. "It's something that happened, and since it has, we're embracing it and trying to understand what that is. I think that us making music and doing it the way we've been doing it—"
Here, he's interrupted. "I think individually, we each have a different relationship," says the soft-spoken Portner, from the head of the table, dressed in a faded Vision Street Wear shirt and a purple bandana. "I don't really share the relationship with the songs that Joshua does."
What are the songs on Feels about for you then?
"Uhhhh... ," he says, caught of guard as he fumbles with some CDs he's snagged from the office. "I think maybe for me, the songs are about being involved with my girlfriend. Kinda. That's how I feel. I feel kind of weird talking about it in an interview."
When did you meet your girlfriend?
"When?"
Yeah.
"Ohhhhh, man. On tour."
Where?
"Uhhh." Portner gives a laugh that lands somewhere in between bashful, confused and impatient.
"Keep him on the porch, dude," says Dibb, referring to a quote he attributes to Lou Reed. Something to the tune of "Let a writer hang out with you on the porch, but never invite the fucker into your kitchen."
Portner is now shifting around and squeaking in his chair. "You know. Around. On tour. It's kinda like... like, um... I mean, I can't, like, name places because it's kind of on the table once I say where I met... her."
There are some more uncomfortable laughs. Animal Collective aren't used to being asked personal questions. Hell, maybe it is intrusive to grill a band about their love life, even if it is for their "love record." But they're incredibly good sports, considering their quiet demeanor and reputation for being guarded.
"It's not like one specific place if that makes any sense. I met her in New York. Because... "
With much haste, Dibb throws down the yellow card and ends the play. "I've always felt that one of the reasons that we don't necessarily want to be so apparent and clear, is when you're listening to lyrics and you can't understand all of what they are, it kind of allows you to come up with your own [interpretation]."
"I can tell you how I relate to each song," Portner says, "but it's not as interesting."
"It's kind of like how Pearl Jam don't do videos," agrees Weitz, clad in a worn yellow shirt, corduroy pants and just-scruffy beard. "'Cause they don't want what they think the song is about to necessarily be told to fans."
"For instance," says Portner, "to me the song 'Flesh Canoe' is about my relationship with Noah at a certain time."
Lennox perks up, his eyes bulging out. "That's news to me."
"But the song is so androgynous and ambiguous about gender that anybody could listen to that and think I'm singing about a girl. It's not like the lyrics are written specifically like, 'Oh, I gotta sing this song to Noah.'"
"When we were recording it, you were kind of staring at me," Lennox says.
"And yet, I'm with this girl and it means a lot to me, and so I feel more connected to it in that relationship, rather than [in terms of] the lyrics that I wrote a long time ago," Portner says. After a long pause, he glances toward Lennox. "Sorry, dude."
The conflicting interpretations thing is no joke, since the next five minutes are spent arguing over what exactly a "Flesh Canoe" is. Dibb, referencing Portner's love of slasher films, had always figured it was about making an actual boat out of someone's skin after slaughtering them. Manager Brian De Lan, who was quietly laptopping on the couch for a half-hour shouts out, "I have to say, I never thought of a dick," which nails the crassness, but supplies the wrong gender, all while Portner smiles ear to ear.
"Or it could be the warmth of... " David stops dramatically for an uncomfortable pause. "I don't know." Noah, who has spent the last 20 minutes quietly picking at the label on a Stella Artois, breaks his insular streak and performs an exceptional Rodney Dangerfield collar tug to an erupting room.
"...a person," Portner continues. "When you gotta share a bed on tour. I'll often wake up in the middle of the night with my arms around Noah."
"Not on purpose," adds Noah, and brotherly laughs fill the room once more.
"I feel Noah is the one who deals [the most] difficultly with being on tour. I feel like, after every stressful tour, he's even more breaking away. We just decided to stop working on music for a while. It just came from a confused confessional... It's almost the sick side of love. There's the side [of love] that most people don't talk about so much. Dealing with people being individuals. Having space."
Accordingly, Portner is taking it very slow with his current girlfriend (not to be too Us Weekly, but she's in another band and donates some "fucking expressive" cascading piano onto the new record). Weitz, who provides the collective with most of their loops and processing, considers being in love with his high-school sweetheart, who was on the other side of the country during his month-long Seattle session for Feels, "the strongest emotion I felt while making that record."
These guys know space. At no time was it more evident then the first time—and last, until Feels—they tried to make a record as a four-piece. Sharing a practice space with other gear-intensive bands like Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance, Here Comes The Indian was a tense and cramped mellow-harsher, marked with little room to breathe, physically and emotionally. Until very recently, Dibb couldn't even listen to it without feeling uncomfortable.
It started on their first big tour, a 2002 trek with Black Dice: a van broke down, their bulky equipment load broke, and the four guys were pretty much broke too. Portner and Lennox lived together, worked together (at New York record haunt Other Music) and practiced three nights a week. Oftentimes there would be rehearsals where no one spoke.
Best friends Dibb and Portner even locked horns, right before a planned benefit with Black Dice to raise money for the Catsup Plate Records mascot, Maximum Cat, who was ill. The ensuing argument, in the middle of a Williamsburg intersection at three in the morning, proved the strengths, limitations and endurance of their friendship. "Dave just totally broke me down," says Dibb. "At the time it was just devastating to hear. 'I know what you do. You show up to practice and expect something to happen there. You don't do anything all week long and you show up and expect these three hours to be this moment where everything's gonna come together.' It was just him throwing the glove down. The fact that we can have that type of relationship and push each other to that degree, I didn't know whether I wanted to run away or punch him in the face. If we hadn't grown up together, I would just be like 'Fuck you, you don't know me!' But it's Dave, and he does know me."
Weitz called it quits for a while, taking off for a full year to score an environmental policy grad degree in Arizona. Dibb, admittedly "not really ready to fully take on the challenge" that Portner had given him, buried himself in carpentry, taking on 12-hour work days. Months later, after Portner and Lennox worked out their issues, the two composed the acclaimed Sung Tongs, which landed the Animals on MTV2, every year-end list imaginable and, ultimately, in the Caroline Distribution conference room fielding questions.
A week later, Dibb is leaning against the brick insides of S&B, a Polish restaurant in Williamsburg, his big blue eyes darting out the window watching the Billyburg hipsterati meander about. Dibb still feels that looking too deep into a band is counterproductive to enjoying its music. "When [writers] start digging for certain things, it's like, 'What are you thinking about?' It just puts it on a level of mythology," Dibb says in between bites of a grilled cheese and spinach sandwhich. "It's interesting that Noah had a baby, but I don't think it's interesting on the level of 'What's your wife's name? Where did she grow up? Which neighborhood do live in? What's your apartment like?' What does that really have to do with anything at all?"
After some hesitation, the tight-lipped Dibb does detail what his life was like in the year and a half between Sung Tongs and Feels—opening up, but sacrificing none of his charismatic inscrutability. He ended his stress by selling most of his possessions, shoving the rest into his mom's basement and crashing on couches in Brooklyn, Maryland and beyond for a little over a year.
"I've just been trying to grow up," he says, balling a napkin. "Trying to straighten my brain. When I got rid of my apartment, getting rid of so much stuff was just a chance to find patterns in my life that are unnecessary. Up until this summer, I was kind of the manager of the band, which was a lot of fucking work. It was a big realization that I haven't been giving myself any personal time. And if I did, it was usually just spent stressing. So that's why I haven't had the time to be all stoked about my woman like the other dudes are. Hopefully that time will come soon."
Dibb pauses to poke at food. Madonna's "Holiday" blasts from the restaurant's tinny speakers. He adopts a slighty serious tone to give an example of how an out-of-control moment could provide illumination in a year packed with reflection. He was hanging at Rogers Sisters-owned Brooklyn bar Daddy's until the five a.m. closing time. He smoked a joint with a friend, stepped outside and realized there was no way he could crash without succumbing to the spins. "So at five o'clock in the morning, I'm by myself wandering around Greenpoint and Williamsburg walking it off, totally out of my mind, wasted, mumbling to myself. I just had this weird realization. I equated feeling out of control in my head because of drinking to how that happens to me anyway. This isn't really a matter of me and chemicals. It's a matter of me understanding how mind and body work together," he says, his napkin ball now reduced to a napkin snake. "And it's not like an energy thing, like all new-agey, but it was just like, 'Let yourself sink into your feet and your legs.' And I just stood there on the corner at six o'clock in the morning when the sun was coming up and all of a sudden felt everything in my body go down to my legs and my feet, and I instantly felt totally grounded... And I just started laughing!"
So, all four Animals have experienced bliss this year in their own way, and the electric, celebratory, orgiastic Feels is the proof—though Dibb would probably prefer that you listen to the record and infer that yourself. Or interpret it however you want. Hey, it's what they do.
"When I listen to these songs, I won't ever think about fights or stressful times," says Weitz. "I'll think about going back to our parents' house and getting Sno Kones and playing soccer. To me, it's about our relationship with each other."
Lennox and fellow Animal David Portner (a.k.a. Avey Tare) were touring through Europe as a duo in late 2003. They had a few days to kill in Lisbon after their final show, which Lennox used as an opportunity to wander off with a stranger.
"We weren't really hanging out much at the time," says Portner. "We needed some space. Our sound guy and his girlfriend were with us, so I lost them for a while, too. When I found them I was like, 'Have you seen Noah?'" Portner emphasizes the anxiety over his misplaced bandmate with a strained whisper. "I was just really paranoid. I was just eating, like, a lot of hash. I hate flying. It creates images of me dying and a lot of really weird imagery in my head. I just started getting paranoid and going 'Oh, man, where's Noah?' And Noah's just off getting laid!"
Lennox casually strolled up two hours before the flight, after Portner stayed awake all night worrying. Much later, Lennox ended up marrying the Portugal-born clothes designer who kept him out for days, eventually moving to Lisbon and becoming a dad. Needless to say, he's in good spirits.
Every Animal Collective record is a living extension of the group's atmosphere. Their free-associative, post-grad nursery rhymes are too cryptic to sanction much interpretation, and the band is too elusive to allow even the tiniest window into their free-psych psyches. All that's open for public viewing is the music: a teetering mess of childish exploration and adult apprehension, of crystalline Beach Boys harmonies and gritty cassette-traded noise experiments, of taut expressions of ecstasy and rambling meditations on melancholy. A bummer tour and a frayed group dynamic led to 2003's temperamental Here Comes The Indian, while newfound opportunity and exposure led to last year's triumphant Sung Tongs. Lennox's whirlwind relationship glow and Portner's brotherly affection are just two of the snuggly feelings the group says influenced their new album, Feels, the seventh record to bear the Animal Collective name. So, what type of record is it?
"The looove record," says Portner, with a smirk and the half-laugh of a navel-gazer.
The four members of Animal Collective—Lennox, Portner, Brian Weitz (a.k.a. Geologist) and Josh Dibb (a.k.a. Deakin)—sit in a wobbly semi-circle around a conference room table in the Caroline Distribution office, a not-uncommon habitat for hard-to-access artists with labor-intensive interview schedules. Just getting them there was a burden, considering they live in Lisbon, Brooklyn, D.C. and nowhere, respectively. The Collective have always preferred to remain cryptic, and have never done so many interviews for an album.
The lanky Dibb, with his barely-there mustache and a necklace as colorful as a string of Froot Loops, guards the back corner of the room, arms folded, playing sheriff of the Mystique Police. Whenever questions veer toward specifics of the Collective's creative process, he throws the seeker off the scent with a vague blanket statement, defusing every attempt to find a common thread in the album's nine songs.
On the record's underlying theme: "There's as many types of songs on the record as there are songs on the record."
On the Collective's general mood during recording: "They come from a pretty wide range of places. It's hard to pinpoint it."
On Lennox's personal life: "So, what were your thoughts on the record?"
For Dibb, Feels is a love letter to life. At 27, he's essentially doing what he's been setting out to do since high school. "Over the past year we've just been learning more and more about how to live in our world and make it be our own at the same time," he says. "It's something that happened, and since it has, we're embracing it and trying to understand what that is. I think that us making music and doing it the way we've been doing it—"
Here, he's interrupted. "I think individually, we each have a different relationship," says the soft-spoken Portner, from the head of the table, dressed in a faded Vision Street Wear shirt and a purple bandana. "I don't really share the relationship with the songs that Joshua does."
What are the songs on Feels about for you then?
"Uhhhh... ," he says, caught of guard as he fumbles with some CDs he's snagged from the office. "I think maybe for me, the songs are about being involved with my girlfriend. Kinda. That's how I feel. I feel kind of weird talking about it in an interview."
When did you meet your girlfriend?
"When?"
Yeah.
"Ohhhhh, man. On tour."
Where?
"Uhhh." Portner gives a laugh that lands somewhere in between bashful, confused and impatient.
"Keep him on the porch, dude," says Dibb, referring to a quote he attributes to Lou Reed. Something to the tune of "Let a writer hang out with you on the porch, but never invite the fucker into your kitchen."
Portner is now shifting around and squeaking in his chair. "You know. Around. On tour. It's kinda like... like, um... I mean, I can't, like, name places because it's kind of on the table once I say where I met... her."
There are some more uncomfortable laughs. Animal Collective aren't used to being asked personal questions. Hell, maybe it is intrusive to grill a band about their love life, even if it is for their "love record." But they're incredibly good sports, considering their quiet demeanor and reputation for being guarded.
"It's not like one specific place if that makes any sense. I met her in New York. Because... "
With much haste, Dibb throws down the yellow card and ends the play. "I've always felt that one of the reasons that we don't necessarily want to be so apparent and clear, is when you're listening to lyrics and you can't understand all of what they are, it kind of allows you to come up with your own [interpretation]."
"I can tell you how I relate to each song," Portner says, "but it's not as interesting."
"It's kind of like how Pearl Jam don't do videos," agrees Weitz, clad in a worn yellow shirt, corduroy pants and just-scruffy beard. "'Cause they don't want what they think the song is about to necessarily be told to fans."
"For instance," says Portner, "to me the song 'Flesh Canoe' is about my relationship with Noah at a certain time."
Lennox perks up, his eyes bulging out. "That's news to me."
"But the song is so androgynous and ambiguous about gender that anybody could listen to that and think I'm singing about a girl. It's not like the lyrics are written specifically like, 'Oh, I gotta sing this song to Noah.'"
"When we were recording it, you were kind of staring at me," Lennox says.
"And yet, I'm with this girl and it means a lot to me, and so I feel more connected to it in that relationship, rather than [in terms of] the lyrics that I wrote a long time ago," Portner says. After a long pause, he glances toward Lennox. "Sorry, dude."
The conflicting interpretations thing is no joke, since the next five minutes are spent arguing over what exactly a "Flesh Canoe" is. Dibb, referencing Portner's love of slasher films, had always figured it was about making an actual boat out of someone's skin after slaughtering them. Manager Brian De Lan, who was quietly laptopping on the couch for a half-hour shouts out, "I have to say, I never thought of a dick," which nails the crassness, but supplies the wrong gender, all while Portner smiles ear to ear.
"Or it could be the warmth of... " David stops dramatically for an uncomfortable pause. "I don't know." Noah, who has spent the last 20 minutes quietly picking at the label on a Stella Artois, breaks his insular streak and performs an exceptional Rodney Dangerfield collar tug to an erupting room.
"...a person," Portner continues. "When you gotta share a bed on tour. I'll often wake up in the middle of the night with my arms around Noah."
"Not on purpose," adds Noah, and brotherly laughs fill the room once more.
"I feel Noah is the one who deals [the most] difficultly with being on tour. I feel like, after every stressful tour, he's even more breaking away. We just decided to stop working on music for a while. It just came from a confused confessional... It's almost the sick side of love. There's the side [of love] that most people don't talk about so much. Dealing with people being individuals. Having space."
Accordingly, Portner is taking it very slow with his current girlfriend (not to be too Us Weekly, but she's in another band and donates some "fucking expressive" cascading piano onto the new record). Weitz, who provides the collective with most of their loops and processing, considers being in love with his high-school sweetheart, who was on the other side of the country during his month-long Seattle session for Feels, "the strongest emotion I felt while making that record."
These guys know space. At no time was it more evident then the first time—and last, until Feels—they tried to make a record as a four-piece. Sharing a practice space with other gear-intensive bands like Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance, Here Comes The Indian was a tense and cramped mellow-harsher, marked with little room to breathe, physically and emotionally. Until very recently, Dibb couldn't even listen to it without feeling uncomfortable.
It started on their first big tour, a 2002 trek with Black Dice: a van broke down, their bulky equipment load broke, and the four guys were pretty much broke too. Portner and Lennox lived together, worked together (at New York record haunt Other Music) and practiced three nights a week. Oftentimes there would be rehearsals where no one spoke.
Best friends Dibb and Portner even locked horns, right before a planned benefit with Black Dice to raise money for the Catsup Plate Records mascot, Maximum Cat, who was ill. The ensuing argument, in the middle of a Williamsburg intersection at three in the morning, proved the strengths, limitations and endurance of their friendship. "Dave just totally broke me down," says Dibb. "At the time it was just devastating to hear. 'I know what you do. You show up to practice and expect something to happen there. You don't do anything all week long and you show up and expect these three hours to be this moment where everything's gonna come together.' It was just him throwing the glove down. The fact that we can have that type of relationship and push each other to that degree, I didn't know whether I wanted to run away or punch him in the face. If we hadn't grown up together, I would just be like 'Fuck you, you don't know me!' But it's Dave, and he does know me."
Weitz called it quits for a while, taking off for a full year to score an environmental policy grad degree in Arizona. Dibb, admittedly "not really ready to fully take on the challenge" that Portner had given him, buried himself in carpentry, taking on 12-hour work days. Months later, after Portner and Lennox worked out their issues, the two composed the acclaimed Sung Tongs, which landed the Animals on MTV2, every year-end list imaginable and, ultimately, in the Caroline Distribution conference room fielding questions.
A week later, Dibb is leaning against the brick insides of S&B, a Polish restaurant in Williamsburg, his big blue eyes darting out the window watching the Billyburg hipsterati meander about. Dibb still feels that looking too deep into a band is counterproductive to enjoying its music. "When [writers] start digging for certain things, it's like, 'What are you thinking about?' It just puts it on a level of mythology," Dibb says in between bites of a grilled cheese and spinach sandwhich. "It's interesting that Noah had a baby, but I don't think it's interesting on the level of 'What's your wife's name? Where did she grow up? Which neighborhood do live in? What's your apartment like?' What does that really have to do with anything at all?"
After some hesitation, the tight-lipped Dibb does detail what his life was like in the year and a half between Sung Tongs and Feels—opening up, but sacrificing none of his charismatic inscrutability. He ended his stress by selling most of his possessions, shoving the rest into his mom's basement and crashing on couches in Brooklyn, Maryland and beyond for a little over a year.
"I've just been trying to grow up," he says, balling a napkin. "Trying to straighten my brain. When I got rid of my apartment, getting rid of so much stuff was just a chance to find patterns in my life that are unnecessary. Up until this summer, I was kind of the manager of the band, which was a lot of fucking work. It was a big realization that I haven't been giving myself any personal time. And if I did, it was usually just spent stressing. So that's why I haven't had the time to be all stoked about my woman like the other dudes are. Hopefully that time will come soon."
Dibb pauses to poke at food. Madonna's "Holiday" blasts from the restaurant's tinny speakers. He adopts a slighty serious tone to give an example of how an out-of-control moment could provide illumination in a year packed with reflection. He was hanging at Rogers Sisters-owned Brooklyn bar Daddy's until the five a.m. closing time. He smoked a joint with a friend, stepped outside and realized there was no way he could crash without succumbing to the spins. "So at five o'clock in the morning, I'm by myself wandering around Greenpoint and Williamsburg walking it off, totally out of my mind, wasted, mumbling to myself. I just had this weird realization. I equated feeling out of control in my head because of drinking to how that happens to me anyway. This isn't really a matter of me and chemicals. It's a matter of me understanding how mind and body work together," he says, his napkin ball now reduced to a napkin snake. "And it's not like an energy thing, like all new-agey, but it was just like, 'Let yourself sink into your feet and your legs.' And I just stood there on the corner at six o'clock in the morning when the sun was coming up and all of a sudden felt everything in my body go down to my legs and my feet, and I instantly felt totally grounded... And I just started laughing!"
So, all four Animals have experienced bliss this year in their own way, and the electric, celebratory, orgiastic Feels is the proof—though Dibb would probably prefer that you listen to the record and infer that yourself. Or interpret it however you want. Hey, it's what they do.
"When I listen to these songs, I won't ever think about fights or stressful times," says Weitz. "I'll think about going back to our parents' house and getting Sno Kones and playing soccer. To me, it's about our relationship with each other."
By Tom Murphy
September 4 2013
http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2013 ... a_bear.php
