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 The most talked about band in the world with an EP that still defies easy categorisation
Imagine for a moment that the internet is something you can hold in
your hands. You pick it up and, ignoring mother’s pleas to leave the
mucky thing alone, you set about building a scrapbook for every band
ever blogged about, by anyone, anywhere. When you’re done, a billion
volumes of yack-stack tower and teeter above you like an ironic and
never-ending forest of corpse trees, but it’s Animal Collective
whose music has inspired the most virtual ‘column inches’; their book
of clippings is so thick Yuri Gagarin can see it, and he’s not just
flung out in space any more, he’s nowhere.
Read more on the jump
And that’s strange, isn’t it? Not that they attract praise, or that
Gagarin’s dead (it’s a dangerous profession), but that so much blather
surrounds the quartet when the noises they make – slippery, absurd,
familiar yet future-new – are so hard to talk about. Taking this record
apart is like diving into the sea and trying to glue water together.
Better to let it wash over you, because the sound of ‘Fall Be Kind’ is one of a band fast running out of context.
Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based, Animal Collective already seem to exist
on no-one else’s terms but their own. This EP looms into life with
‘Graze’; a track that begins by stealing Walt Disney’s strings and
disappears while playing electric panpipes on a medieval waltzer. Where
did it go? Where did the electricity come from? Is Walt Disney still
frozen in the past? Gluing. Water.
That absurd, time-defying hoedown somehow bleeds seamlessly into ‘What Would I Want? Sky’,
which has been in Animal Collective’s live set for over a year, and as
such is already more famous on the internet than Tyson the
skateboarding bulldog. Sun-baked and blissed out, it’s just as warming
and impressive as watching Tyson roll around California’s oceanfront
and mocks the band’s assertion that what’s here was “too dark” for
their last album. It contains the first legal sample, sounds a bit like Lemon Jelly’s ‘The Staunton Lick’ and still manages – through its hook’s hypnotic repetition – to be the best thing you’ll hear all day.
The surprises continue to gather. ‘On A Highway’ and ‘I Think I Can’
are the most ‘standard’ Animal Collective fare here, the former guided
through a lonely night drive by Avey Tare, his eyes picking out pissing
workmen, pretty lady passengers and dreaming bandmate Noah Lennox. The
latter, the EP’s final track, is Noah’s, and as such loops and lopes
along, his throat trailing cascades across strange, quacking synths and
war-march drums as he harmonises with sampled versions of himself. It’s
good – everything on ‘Fall Be Kind’ is good – but it’s not something we
haven’t heard done better before, either in Animal Collective’s past or
in 2007, on Lennox’s full-length ‘Person Pitch’.
That’s not to say their past is becoming a curse. This EP’s centrepiece, a stunning hymnal called ‘Bleed’,
ranks alongside anything Lennox, Tare (real name David Portner), Brian
‘Geologist’ Weitz and Josh ‘Deakin’ Dibb have ever put their names to.
Slow-motion and sparse, it’ll widen your eyes and put an ache in your
gut; consisting of little more than Tare’s cooing, Lennox’s wailing and
the sombre drone of a lone cello. Stripped of all the sonic flotsam
that usually surrounds them, Animal Collective come into their own – if
you can ignore the chatter to listen with innocent ears, they surpass
‘good’ and remain bewildering.
Kev Kharas
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