Collected Animals

"Avey Tare and Panda Bear are undergoing what real psychologists call regression-- that is, a return to a more developmentally immature level of mental functioning. The Animal collective has always evinced a juvenile sensibility, but a line needs to be drawn. There's a difference between playful, spirited getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-child juvenalia and the less wholesome pants-crapping juvenalia."

"Throwin' the Round Ball" (round ball fixation = bedwetting, I'm told)"

So, let's say the ideal of all progressive music is Freud's phallic phase: "Wow, this feels good when I touch it! I'll just keep doing it." Then, Danse Manatee might be located firmly in Freud's anal phase: "Mommy, look what I made!"

So, yeah, the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion is incredibly good. For me, "My Girls", the danceable and insanely catchy ode to the bonds of family sung by Panda Bear, was the record's first "I need to play this song 10 times in a row right now" moment.

The only thing that stays the same with Animal Collective is change. Even if you don't think they're consistently brilliant, at least they're consistently different-- they have an open-minded, progressive attitude that I find more admirable as their profile grows. Like most of January's Merriweather Post Pavilion, "What Would I Want? Sky"-- from the forthcoming Fall Be Kind EP-- doesn't sound like anything the band recorded before it, but it still sounds like Animal Collective (call it style, call it voice-- they just manage to color everything they touch).

"Sky" is probably one of the more legible, straightforward pieces of music the band has released, and is also among the most immediately appealing: three minutes of lightly overdriven drum breaks and vocal lines dissolve into three minutes of high-gloss folk-pop. The guitars are audible, the percussion is recognizable. They probably could've made it easier to bob your head to; instead, they put it in a tricky time signature that feels like the meter infants learn to walk in. There's something here that reminds me of new age or yoga or the 1990s, but I can't put my finger on it-- whatever it is, it's appropriate coming from a group that has, through no specific positioning of their own, become the jamband for people who profess to dislike jambands.

Oh, on jambands: "Sky" samples-- and takes its title from-- Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" (incidentally, the first-ever cleared GD sample). Considering the Dead are probably personae non gratae with a good chunk of the A.C. demographic, the sample comes as a nice band-fan challenge (personally, I've never been a big Grateful Dead fan, but my objections are musical, not social). In the original song, the lyric is "Willow sky/ Whoa, I walk and wonder why." In Animal Collective's version, the lyric is flipped: The end of the line becomes the beginning, and "Whoa, I walk" is deliberately misheard as "What would I want?" I mention it because it's what this band has always done for me: take a sound and turn it inside out to make something new, but something recognizable, even familiar.

But "What Would I Want? Sky" sounds as natural as something that grew out of the earth.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just a Philistine, or maybe it's because I'm not from New York—which may be saying the same thing—but I just don't get how a bunch of grunting and howling is supposed to turn basic folk-rock into some kind of transcendental listening experience. Sure, Animal Collective hinted that their new release Feels would be more "experimental" than their previous work (though it shares many traits with their last album Sung Tongs). But that, as ever, is no excuse for making a ho-hum record.

The second half of Feels is better than the first, mostly because it's calmer. Early tracks like "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle" are so bombastically cheery as to make The Polyphonic Spree seem phlegmatic—and your skip-ahead button seem virtually irresistible.

Problem is, Feels fails to come together as a coherent whole. Even as you find yourself enjoying one of the tracks, the next is inevitably jarring or out of place. There's no musical plan here or, if there is, it's the sort of plan that Dr. Evil would come up with.

It contains enough kernels of Animal Collective's older, simpler work to please the hardcore hippie that surely lurks inside you. But if you're just getting interested in the band for the first time, you'd be better off checking out Danse Manatee instead.

**/*****

At first, it embarrassed me. Men who had been covered in The New York Times had no business squealing like infants. But in the squealing there was the promise of a safe space, a circle of protection in which I was invited to experience feelings that didn’t have a place anywhere else. There’s a reason Animal Collective’s music has been compared to primal scream therapy: Both suggest that there’s no such thing as progress without a little bit of carefully mediated regress. At 21, staring down the cold inevitability of adulthood, I not only wanted this but needed it. The loving, demented babytalk of Sung Tongs became my psychological ball pit: A place where I could play, get dirty, and still have a heavily mediated shot at feeling young.

The sixth album by this neocommunalist, neopsychedelic quartet improves on 2005's Feels, flashing more shards of tune to lure the coeds with the Coleman PerfectFlow InstaStart Lanterns over to their adamantly unkempt campfire. The welcoming "Peacebone," the energetic "Chores" and the elated "Cuckoo Cuckoo" might get a young leisure consumer to risk conversion at one of the grotty neoprimitivist orgies their shows are bruited to be. Then again, the ninety seconds of weirded-up solo organ ostinato that then underlies or swallows three minutes of incomprehensible singing on "Winter Wonder Land" might inspire the same normal to stay home and watch Seinfeld reruns. It depends on how he or she felt about the six-minute centerpiece, "For Reverend Green," where the listener strains to hear frontman Avey Tare rave, "I think it's all right to feel human now." Great, really. But didn't we know that already?

An Animal Collective album could sound like noise struggling to become a song, or a nursery rhyme that had been melted down and smeared across the stereo field. Listening to them was like looking at a mask: I might recognize it as a face, but I’d never mistake it for one.

HCTI review on pitchfork