Saturday, October 13, 2007
Animal Collective have made a career of music that communicates in purely musical terms the same effect that a great scary story communicates through language—the short but startling journey from the mundane to the bizarre. The songs from the new LP Strawberry Jam succeed best—and mostly succeed—when they unfold from this central dichotomy between the familiar and the unknown. This is nothing unexpected from a group who has from their very inception declared an intention to expand the boundaries of pop music. A vague, if disingenuously naïve, aim, Animal Collective deserve commemoration—even canonization—for making hay from such a simple ethos: over six albums, numerous EPs, and sundry side projects, the band have consistent turned out tasteful, provocative, and pleasurably consumable art by running seemingly familiar raw material—Beach Boys harmonics, Sonic Youth/Black Dice cacophony, Holy Modal Rounder avant-folk—through a phenomenal sausage press of their own idiosyncratic patent. For Strawberry Jam, they have run a batch of strawberries through that press. The production values are fruity-sweet, almost to a fault in the early tracks. Mostly abandoning the acoustic, hollow, woody textures of their previous albums, Sung Tongs (2004) and Feels (2006), Jam returns the band to the metallic mercury noise that characterized their early career, but with a more polished veneer. In the opening track “Peacebone,” for example, the various components that on albums like Here Comes the Indian and Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirt They’ve Vanished were intermixed practically beyond individual distinction are here almost embarrassingly (by AC’s own standards) teased apart for clarity. The song is redeemed by the frightening kindergartenism of its lyrics, as well as its quintessentially Animal Collective shout-and-response chorus that melds shrieking with upper-register tooting. Track two, “Unsolved Mysteries,” is by far the album’s weakest, a gaping flaw (uninspired arrangement, uninterestingly flat melody) in what by the forth track, the exuberant ode (though it has little musically to do with soul) “For Reverend Green,” sounds like a band well into a faultless set—one that you are glad has been recorded this richly.
“Reverend Green”’s impossibly intricate doo-doo-doo lines are followed by equally the marvelous loop-d-loop falsetto pyrotechnics that make “Fireworks” a consecutive highlight. “#1” follows these with an off-kilter, float-suggesting arrangement that plods slowly in front of a cascading synthesizer arpeggio which flutters in-and-out tempo with the dominant melody—the same effect that is seen when the turn signals of two cars blink in sequences that approach, achieve, and then depart from synchronicity. “Derek,” the final track, finds the band closest to the whacked sing-a-long spirit of Sung Tongs, only to through in throw a heavy, cash-register-ish percussion riff (reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Revolving Doors”) into the fray halfway through, catapulting the song into a new valence of energy.
The admirable thing about this music is that it seems to the listener so easy to have made—as simple as grasping a thick strawberry and squeezing it into a fascinating pulp. Not so: music this loose requires precision, even when its more regimented passages are performed with the unbridled, uncivilized energy that is the hallmark of all things Animal Collective. Years from now, it may justly been recognized that they have accomplished something that many like-minded musicians could not: a body of music as undeniably experimental, distancing and indecipherable as it is joyously accessible, welcoming, and felt.
