Of Animals and Flowers: thoughts on Animal Collective

Svankmejer's Alice

Animal Collective is a music collective of avant-garde musicians from Baltimore, Maryland. Records released under the name Animal Collective may include contributions from any or all of these members; the line-up is not uniform. The band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age.

 

Comprising Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb), and Geologist (Brian Weitz), Animal Collective are the Peter Pans of indie-rock. Four thirty-somethings from Baltimore, whose stage names betray their regard for childhood, have made eight albums of head-spinning pop which evoke the fleeting highs and dreams of pre-pubescence where life seemingly stretches out with endless possibilities.

Although the band is sometimes classified as psych folk, indie-rock or noise rock, it is hard to define the Animal Collective sound as they often experiment with diverse styles and ideas from album to album. The group also runs Paw Tracks on which they have released their own material as well as material by artists such as Ariel Pink, Terrestrial Tones, and The Peppermints. 

 By all accounts, their ninth album is a dizzying knees-up that makes most music sound bloodless, common-or-garden and pathetically timid. Certainly, their eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion is exuberant, informed by an ecstatic boundless joy that surges ever forward, seemingly attempting to break the boundaries that encloses the everyday, and judging from the explosive opener in the In the Flowers, wherein Avey Tare’s incantation makes a plea for a temporary respite, “If I could just leave my body for the night”.

In the Flowers begins with a vision; Avey Tare is on his way home when he spies a boy, stoned and care free, dancing in a field. Responding as if he has stumbled across an alien scene, this spectacle renders him unable to respond to the dancer’s joy. Tare, it seems, simply cannot reconcile his own sadness with an embodied space, now made alien by another’s exuberant expression. Witnessing this scene, Tare’s rapturous incantation, “If I could just my body for the night” is perhaps a plaintive cry for another space, a cry to be shown the pathway to becoming otherwise, no matter how temporary. Tare consoles himself, now seeing the dance anew: “Then we could  be dancing no more missing you while I am gone / Then we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song / And then ours would meet them we will recognise nothing’s wrong”. Here, In the Flowers, we find the choice made wherein Avey Tare chooses empathy instead of opting for jealousy and bitterness.  

Overall, Animal Collective’s instrumentation pushes the listener through the prism of the familiar into a world made strange. Such are their tactics of de-familiarisation that we are inexorably pushed through the rabbit-hole, coming up on the other side to a lush sonic landscape made anew. Forced into their world, we witness the seemingly banal re-made ecstatic and marvellous through the prism of aural love.  Even Summertime Clothes, a rapturous piece, is anchored in a seething electronic reef seeking to break the conventions of everyday (pop) sensibility.

The currency of hype, often the elephant in the room, is difficult to schematize, but it roughly equates to word-of-mouth, plus the apparatuses of journalism. Throw into this mix the special x-factor. Most bands associated with the h-word have x-factors that involve an aggregate of various extra-musical marginalia, fashions, back-stories, and unifying visual aesthetics. This is the stuff that musical journalists use to fatten their paragraphs and self-aggrandize their profession. Animal Collective dropped most of their shtick when they stopped wearing masks. Their x-factor is a rare one: they make fantastic, unique, relentless singular records with a regularity that suggests an enchanted acumen.

 And while it is misleading to impose a trajectory to the evolution of a band, Animal Collective has always resisted aesthetic stasis, easy compartmentalization or the readily formulaic and banal. Every subsequent offering from Animal Collective has been a re-imagination of its own sound-craft and song-craft. Merriweather Post Pavilion is easily their most lyrical and accessible, offering a diverse catalogue of sounds in a sonic language that soars every upwards, defying gravity and easy definitions. 

 For Animal Collective, their shtick is simply a quest for another way to carving out sounds. For them, music is not an end in itself but a medium, a portal towards something bewildering and obscure.  

Time will of course tell if Animal Collective lives up to their sonic ambitions of capturing myriad treasures. But for now, we can simply lie back and witness an ecstatic dancing and pulsing of sounds.