Animal Collective are wearing what appears to be war paint and gazing at We Love the 80's on a five-foot-tall television. The four—Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin, and Geologist, not their real names—have converged in Manhattan for a press day to promote their extraordinary new album Feels, out this week. In an East Village loft they've applied their own Lord of the Flies–style makeup and are sitting for a photographer while VH1 looms, larger and snarkier than life, on a wall to their left. A fake deer head enters the picture, and later the guys are convinced, not without some giggling, to lose their shirts. Some would have it that these young men, whose music owes more to drum circles, field recordings, and playground sounds than to, let's say, Pavement, are the primitivists of today's indie rock. One Pitchfork reviewer even described their music, noting its childlike, rapturous ardor, as "pants-crapping juvenalia [sic]." But in a town looking beyond past-punk struts, where Gang of Four imitations have pretty much run their course, the radically sincere Animal Collective now hold the conch shell. Quite possibly, they've even played it on one of their albums.
"For a while, there were a lot of bands that seemed purposefully antagonistic," says Dave Portner, a/k/a Avey Tare, the band's sometimes effusive frontman-by-default. "We're like, 'No, come in!' " He then adds: "Well, maybe for the first two years it was, 'No, come back! And don't throw ice at us!' " The collective's latest set wasn't made for the choir—fans tend to pick favorites from the band's one-of-a-kind discs and measure others against them. (See sidebar.) Nevertheless their audience has snowballed with each subsequent release. Their 2004 album, Sung Tongs, placed 21st in the Voice's Pazz & Jop poll. For the unconverted, there's no better place to start than with the new CD, where the band's intrinsic appeal radiates more unselfconsciously than it ever has. Difficult though it may be to pin down their sound—you might hear Beat Happening, shout gospel, the Shaggs, Syd Barrett, or John Cage—here the essential elements seem uncomplicated. Warped melodic echoes are extrapolated from simple strums, beats peeled off into pounding tom and drumstick clicks. And then there are the (mostly unintelligible) vocals: layers, accents, rhythms, pure sound, and contorted harmony, contributed by the entire group. And from all this materializes songs, with hooks. Hooks seemingly wielded by a sotted pirate, but still, hooks.
None of this is what first strikes you, though. Imagine dropping acid before you go to a pool party. In fourth grade. Burbling in the incipient drone of "Did You See the Words," the new disc's opener, are the sounds of kids laughing, some massaged upward into bird-like noises. As a bright, wavery groove begins percolating, a giddy monotone whisper breaks in, and one imagines a child rushing to tell his mother about hallucinations he's having: "Have you seen the bird cut open . . . inky periods drip from your mailbox." And then it all bursts open with a riot of yelping voices, cut and arranged like flowers.
Some have unimaginatively characterized AC as freak-folkers. If anything, the band has joined a tradition of indie eccentrics attempting "outsider music"—what WFMU DJ Irwin Chusid defines as "sonic exotica . . . the product of supernatural possession, damaged DNA, drug fry, psychosis—or none of the above." (The disc's cover art evokes the work of that most famous of outies, Henry Darger, author of The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.) The merely earnest and hardly amateur Animal Collective would fall under none of the above, but one suspects they know something of being baked, if not fried.
