Weekly Release Spotlight: Animal Collective

Posted on 9/13/2007

Animal Collective

Strawberry Jam

[Domino]

When it's near impossible to decipher a band's discography and you're listening to something that sounds similar to a hybrid of circus music, fervent youth, and bloodletting nightmares, it's really hard to sit down and write intelligently about it. Of course, with the 4th (maybe? 5th? does it matter?) proper studio album under the name Animal Collective releasing its demented wrath on the public this week, just about everyone who knows how to operate a keyboard and knows what "Elbo.ws" means is trying to construct the perfect sentence that describes the aural insanity at work on Strawberry Jam. Seriously, I've already attempted it 2.5 times in this very opening paragraph and what I'm hearing in my headphones is still nowhere near the inexistent linguistic combination of positive and negative adjectives or friendly and scary imagery that is required in order to properly describe the one and only Animal Collective.

Music geek hyperbole aside, it is in this writer's humble opinion that the more quality time one spends with Animal Collective, the more apparent are the reasons for their so quickly cemented Artist for the New Milennium status since their breakthrough album, 2004's Sung Tongs. Surely, upon first listen, and I don't mean to sound condescending because I felt the same way when I first stuck Sung Tongs into my ear canals, the quartet's knack for burying possibly gorgeous melodies underneath a very consciously placed dust cloud of brokenness sounds like weirdness for weirdness's sake. Yet, as "Kids on Holiday" continued to repeat on the K during that summer, I was transported from a world where Avey Tare and Panda Bear's vocal infectiousness was fragmented and disorienting to a mystical underbelly of pop music where they crawled agitatedly and ferociously to the forefront and became more powerful upon the 100th listen than the unforgettable first time I had heard the sweetness of a perfect traditional pop song by Belle & Sebastian, for instance.

It's not remarkable to say that when pop and noise are used in equal measure and with equal focus, the most incendiary and unique music is made. Subversive pop musicians have been exercising this notion for years, literally creating subgenres that would become trendy in the future indie rock scene. But what's different between Animal Collective's beastly sound and say, the Jesus and Mary Chain's cultivation of drone-pop or Gang of Four's infusion of paranoid agit-punk is that while those artists brilliantly took two seemingly unlike styles and made them an unforgettable one, Animal Collective works in plurals. Rather, AC is a noise-pop wormhole - not a mere mortal's classic invention. It plunges into the deepest unknown chasms of sound, allowing that which exists to transform their pop music rather than picking and choosing a select few from a list of infinity.

On Sung Tongs, AC obviously distinctly chose a few elements (folk, tribal rhythms, ambience) to construct their sound. Their follow-up Feels got deeper into psych trips, but more notably, their richer and bolder essence started to come to fruition. Finally, Strawberry Jam, despite its very literal album cover (maybe it’s a red herring?), erases all previous influences, tinges, and subtleties that one could possibly connect to so-called "influences." However, what lies beneath all these unknown and from-another-dimension noises is still what lies on the top of most pop songs: pleasant ("Derek") yet exciting ('Winter Wonder Land") ups and downs, high notes, low notes, and alternations with patterns, sometimes repeated ("Peacebone"), sometimes not ("Cuckoo Cuckoo'). It is indeed the ultimate brain tickle.

Stream: Animal Collective - Peacebone