Animal Collective: STRAWBERRY JAM by Evan Greenwald
January 15, 2008
Well let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but really, this is a musical achievement. A band has actually combined the weird-noise beep-boop-bopping of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the jolly dance of the circus, and, but only sometimes, the brainless insane screech of the screemo genre into one compact nine-song album.
Imagine you’ve got yourself a fifty-five-minute, twenty-eight-second long caffeine rush that just happens to sound great too, and there you go. Animal Collective.
Some of it actually doesn’t sound good at all (the mumbling drone of “1″), but when it works, it’s a miracle. Easily the best song, “Peacebone,” though lacking in the insanity, is one of the most brilliant songs I’ve heard all year. From the jumpy bass line, the sugar rush synthesizers, and the ridiculously good lyrics (“I was a jugular vein in a juggler’s girl/I was supposedly leaking the most interesting colors”), that still retain poetic brilliance even after your realize that none of them make any sense at all.
“For Reverend Green” is the song where the Collective start, and stop, screaming. If begins and a jolly pop tune with distorted loops playing underneath Avey Tare’s singsong microphonage. But, almost at random times it switches to the full-throttle screech, the alt-metal wail that not only is unexpected, but is also very good sounding.
Sometimes the revolution comes from places we didn’t expect it to come from. What Animal Collective have done doesn’t exactly sound consistently good, but it is unfailingly original, and occasionally it’s brilliant.
Key Tracks: Peacebone, For Reverend Green, Winter Wonder Land
