Animal Collective - A Bucolic Hallucination

We're in the so-called noughties. The zoo is empty, the animals have escaped, music has become a matter for intellectuals. The ills of a pervasive culture have snuffed out that spark in the name of critical clarity and historical accuracy.

Rock is the music of "young people", and "young people" are a commercial category. Business, marketing, wool over the eyes. Undoubtedly one of the finest operations ever attempted in the field, since rather than simply refreshing a product, an entirely new category was created out of thin air. But today the trick has been exposed, and the toy is broken.

Rock music could be defined in many ways. At the time of its origins, around the mid-1950s, it wouldn't have been foolish to think of it as avant-garde popular music — though that avant-garde nature lies entirely in the remarkable marketing operation we mentioned, since musically it wasn't really all that new, with many of its seeds easily traceable in American popular music from the first half of the century, which came back forcefully into the spotlight in the new millennium, with a fresh coat of paint and the name "prewar folk".

But as we were saying, because of the pervasive musical culture spreading since the late '90s, the offspring of digital anarchism, the toy breaks — and it breaks because, once the mechanism was understood, someone got the idea that rock music was supposed to be something detached from commerce and "pure" in some possible sense. There had already been strong warning signs of this naive "rockist sensibility", which took concrete shape in the '90s, when the necessary lo-fi sound of the '80s became a virtue through an act of cultural propaganda, or perhaps a collective hallucination.

But purity can't rest solely on lo-fi aesthetics and estrangement (sometimes outright hostility) toward the channels of the music biz. Another viable path is the search for roots, so it's no surprise that even in the ultra-metropolitan setting of New York there's been a widespread blossoming of "roots-oriented" acts: from the rusty garage-blues scene to the folk experimentation of Jackie-O-Motherfucker, or before that the bucolic post-rock of Rex, not to mention the important acid-folk scene of the 60s and the cyclical anti-folk movements that emerged from it, then and now. After all, Harry Smith himself was, for better or worse, a New Yorker.

Among all these groups there was one that, in the mid-60s, incredibly managed to land a record deal for an album that was immediately branded, back in 1966, as the worst of all time. It was called "Contact High With The Godz", and the band tried to celebrate the raw instinct of rock matter (which, in the end, boiled down to sex and drugs — you get the idea) in a way that was unheard of at the time: by carefully avoiding any study of music or instruments.

Perhaps it's nothing more than yet another childish, rambling attempt to reach some form of primordial purity, but the fact remains that today Animal Collective (who, unlike the Godz, actually do know how to play their instruments) represent an attempt analogous to theirs, only one shaped by its own era — and the relevance is already there in the deliberate choice of name: even if prewar music was in fact governed by strong commercial logic, more so than today, harking back to man-as-animal, if not to the animal tout court, could be the winning move.

"Our music has a vitalistic spirit, the one America has by now lost. We love Walt Whitman, we want to grow beards like him. [...] On the next record we're going to make electronic music like America's forests." With these words, given to Blow-Up in October 2003, the collective offers an excellent and already exhaustive presentation of its own music, as well as a crystal-clear statement of intent regarding that vitalism cropping up in so many places in early-2000s sounds, from Microphones to the Jewelled Antler Collective, all the way to No Neck Blues Band and the new noise primitivists of the northeast, among whom Animal Collective could not unreasonably be placed.

The collective's story, however, begins in the provinces — specifically in Baltimore County, in the Maryland countryside, where it's easy to picture David Portner (Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) off on long treks through the woods and across open fields in search of the marrow of life, or simply a quiet spot to get wasted on acid — not that the two pursuits were necessarily mutually exclusive.

The pair lived in the quiet Baltimore suburbs and were essentially strangers to the city's music scene, which was then seeing a proliferation of fairly traditional rock bands. From early adolescence, Noah decided to try making music with his friend Josh (whom we'll later see in the collective under the pseudonym Conrad Deakin), and the two even produced a cassette featuring a photo of a group of pandas on the cover.

Hence Noah Lennox's nickname, which would also belong to the first member of the collective to release a "proper" album, on the modest Soccer Star Records in 1999. The record, self-titled and now impossible to find, moves in the direction of folktronic singer-songwriting — like an opiated Barrett dipped in electronics — save for a few bursts of tropicalist vitality that would partly echo in the subsequent project co-created with his friend David Portner, who by then had rechristened himself Avey Tare.

Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They're Vanished (2000) is the self-produced record on which Panda plays drums, while Avey Tare handles piano, guitar, laptop and vocals.

The opening "Spirit, They're Vanished" immediately recalls Flaming Lips drowned in a lysergic ocean of bleeps and freely roaming oscillators, while Portner intones one of those chants destined to become the Maryland duo's trademark. Immersion into Animal Collective's fantastical world is sealed by the following "April And The Phantom", introduced by a wonderfully lopsided electronic music box that spills into a sort of lysergic bossa nova — less deranged than Os Mutantes, but also more childlike. The record continues, characterized mostly by long melodic compositions somewhere between Barrett and the Bowie who lived on Mars, skillfully repeated to induce in the listener a state of blissful trance owing, for once, more to psychedelic syrup (Avey Tare is a genuine Deadhead, a fan of the Grateful Dead) than to the obsessive repetitions of techno or the mathematical precision of minimalist compositions. That perfect balance between classic melodicism and stoned ecstasy is the most original aspect of a record that, at the time, was noticed by the usual handful of people, but has since been rediscovered and is now considered by some to already be a high point for the Maryland animal crew.

This music is a child of upper-middle-class America, of a serene childhood spent in the company of television, with an imagination skillfully shaped by figures like Jim Henson, the brilliant creator of The Muppet Show, who — not coincidentally — was also involved in the hugely successful kids' series "Bear in the Big Blue House", a show featuring big furry puppets that was a massive hit in the States, as well as an ideal and iconic backdrop for everything bearing the Animal Collective stamp. The relationship with childhood is a crucial theme in this music, made by guys who, in high school, preferred to picture themselves as fantastical "psychedelic warriors" rather than indulge in the kind of wild teenage drinking so common in the deepest suburbs. Avey Tare, Panda Bear and the others' favorite pastimes were horror movies, to be watched without exception in the dusty attic of the Portner household, followed by long nocturnal rambles through the woods of Baltimore, straight out of a Stephen King novel. The vitalism mentioned earlier is already present in embryonic form on the unnamed third track of Spirit, They're Gone..., a piercing, liberating electronic scream, far removed from the lightness of the rest of the album, and one destined to brand the band's sound for good in the years to come.

At this point, Rob Carmichael's Catsup Plate label — having met the band at a show — began distributing their releases, and by the following Danse Manatee in 2001 they had officially become a trio with the addition of Brian Waltz, aka The Geologist, who handles keyboards here, though on this record more than any other it's fair to assume everyone plays and improvises with whatever happens to be at hand.

Danse Manatee, in fact, immediately takes on the mood of an anarchic instrumental orgy, tiptoeing its way through. There are few proper songs, and among them it's worth singling out "Essplode", which sounds like early-90s Flaming Lips, only completely gutted of backbone. Sharp, vividly colored electronic sounds and instrumental crescendos enriched by feverish, ghostly voices take center stage this time, in some cases leaving the impression of aimless noodling for its own sake, with the listener seemingly being taken for a ride. That's at least the first impression, and it's no surprise that Danse Manatee is usually cited as the collective's weakest work — tellingly, it was reissued by the oh-so-trendy Fat Cat in 2003 alongside its more beloved predecessor.

This is certainly a transitional work, still quite blurry and just as unripe, but not without its charm. The setting grows ever more Carrollian, and listening to it feels like being watched by the prying eyes of the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland. The overall tone is certainly darker than on the debut, and several tracks are genuine nursery-rhyme lunacy for disturbed children, whereas on Spirit, They're Gone... the childlike quality was definitely sunnier and closer to how the same theme would soon be handled by the exponents of the reborn prewar current, ready to storm the American underground scene.

Portner moved to the Big Apple (following the exact same path as Half Japanese, another bunch who knew a thing or two about primitivism) to attend college, but within a few months it became clear that what really interested him was music, and songwriting in particular, more than his studies. So, taking advantage of Panda's brief relationship with a New York girl, he roped his friend into making an album that was finally meant to sound "solid" and mark a change of course for the two musicians. But before arriving at what would prove to be the group's pivotal release, the three little animals decided, for the umpteenth time, to change their name and record an introspective album, Campfire Songs.

Campfire songs are the American semantic equivalent of our own "a bonfire, a joint, a Battisti record", and the setting of choice is, once again, typically the woods at night, maybe by the embers roasting marshmallows (thankfully American cuisine has no equivalent in Italian cuisine). Taken as a whole, the image is a cornerstone of American culture, and campfire songs have been paid tribute by artists you might not necessarily expect, like Michelle Shocked and 10,000 Maniacs — although in the case of Campfire Songs, the inspiration seems to come more from the deeply personal campfire songs of Supreme Dicks' "The Unexamined Life", or from the melancholy psychedelia of early Bugskull.

The record (Catsup Plate, 2003) is essentially one long, deeply mournful suite split into five parts. It's entirely acoustic and was recorded outdoors, complete with unintentional concrete-music textures. The opening "Queen In My Pictures" eases us into this wildly off-kilter bucolic universe with a slow, ancient-sounding madrigal dissolved in acid, followed by the livelier "Doggy", which gets lost in a sea of echoes and found percussion. "Two Corvettes" is the most melancholy track on the record, built around an endless banjo refrain with mandolin and harp somewhere in the background (or so it seems), while the vocals, always teetering on the edge of being out of tune, evoke a hippie mythology now crystallized and lost forever in its reunion with the very American roots it sprang from. "Moo Rah Rah Rain" is a long excursion deep into Native American territory, with the slow crescendos typical of so much weird-folk of that era, first and foremost the renewed acoustic style of minimalist experimenter Richard Youngs, before arriving at "De Soto De Son", which closes the album with one of its most intelligible melodies, close to the folk tradition that Animal Collective themselves claim to have no part in, their stated intention being to push even further back, toward the primordial, life-affirming essence of music.

This obsession with such themes is consistently borne out in concerts where untamed improvisation is a given for the musicians, who perform dressed as stuffed animals - fitting, given the imagery they evoke, surely born of an avid reading of 19th-century American writers, essayists and poets like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, in whom the exaltation of nature's vitalism ends up forming one of the absolute cornerstones of the new puritan America's lifestyle, complete with undertones bordering on the macabre or at least the fairy-tale-like, and here too the influences of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the already-mentioned Lewis Carroll probably played a leading role.

Here Comes The Indian (Pawtracks, 2003) is the record that brought Animal Collective international fame, the one on which they finally "sign" as a collective (this time Conrad Deakin is also part of the lineup). Preceded by lively word-of-mouth online and promoted via a support tour slot with the red-hot Black Dice of “Beaches and Canyons“, Here Comes The Indian è sicuramente una delle uscite più interessanti dell’anno e diventa subito un nuovo classico dell’outsider music. Indeed, despite their trendy associations (Black Dice and a good chunk of the New York neo-noise scene) and a certain kinship of intent with prewar folk, musically the collective plunges into the limbo of freaks from the American rock underground, echoing groups like Godz, Caroliner, Amon Duul I, Red Krayola and, above all, Cromagnon, authors in 1969 of the little-known underground cult favorite "Orgasm", in which a commune of hippies in the grip of lysergic delirium offered up percussive, perverse and prescient music (just ask David Tibet).

The album opens with the electronic buzz of "Native Belle", which gradually morphs into a heavily distorted chant worthy of The Residents, submerged moreover in a viscous electronic sludge propped up by lurching tribal rhythms, with a sound that is in truth far "fuller" and more fully realized than on previous works. This time the album moves more decisively toward more primitive, uncontaminated musical traditions, such as African percussion or Native American music, explicitly paid tribute to in the noise-rock pow wow of "Hey Light". The following "Infant Dressing Table" is yet another tribute to childhood, this time in the form of a woozy, hyper-distorted lullaby in the style of the earliest Mercury Rev, with an added dose of Bugskull-like narcolepsy, also echoed in the closing "Too Soon", a sort of hopelessly belated hippie ode carpeted with ping-pong balls. In the middle stretch, the terrifying force of nature emerges in all its dreadful fury ("Panic"), before folding back into desperate nocturnal howls ("Slippi") within thoroughly saturated post-kraut structures.

A towering, uncompromising album, it rivals the Microphones' titanic "Mount Eerie" in reviving the concept album for the new century, and (deservedly) earns mentions in the year-end lists of nearly every specialist magazine and discerning website.

The band is talked about more and more, and certainly not just because they're based in New York - something not everyone could say with certainty at the time...

Avey Tare also has the honor of putting out a split single with David Grubbs, guru of 90s avant-rock, in a kind of symbolic, propitiatory investiture.

For the next chapter of the saga, Avey Tare and Panda Bear go back to being the sole owners of the Animal Collective name, focusing on more traditional songwriting and buoyed by a newer, more mature and colorful sound. Sung Tongs (Fat Cat, 2004), by the authors' own admission in the liner notes, sounds like "a record of songs about going back to an old house, hanging out doing nothing with friends, or making music with bones". In terms of themes, melodies and relaxed atmosphere, the album gets back on the rails of the debut, Spirit, They're Gone, Spirit, They're Vanished, while adjusting course toward greater variety and concision. In the same year that Brian Wilson's "Smile" finally saw the light of day, Animal Collective delivered a collection of songs that restores the primacy of the voice in music - from the vocal interplay of "Leaf House", to the age-old flavor of the single "Who Could Win A Rabbit", capable of rousing even a valium addict with its intoxicating pull, right up to the shameless homage - to the Beach Boys, no less - of "College", whose single line "You don't have to go to college" sums up rather neatly this band's poetics of naturalness, free from any scheme dictated by others. Also in keeping with the early work are the fairy-tale atmospheres of "The Softest Voice" and "Mouth Wooed Her", rendered at their best with precious acoustic arpeggios, and the Brazilian-flavored interlude "Street Road". The immediate predecessor, on the other hand, is echoed by the sprawling "Visitings Friends", an acoustic mantra built on a crescendo of guitars and filtered vocals, and the percussive "We Tigers", an untamed kraut-folk invective only just tamed by the dose of melody that Here Comes The Indian was lacking. Closing the circle are the pop-song "Kids On Holiday", whose simple melody and obsessive rhythmic bed might hint at the collective edging toward the upper reaches of the indie charts, the closing, lopsided, hiccupping "Whaddit I Done", and the gorgeous "Winter's Love", a joyful lament of the heart played on woodwinds and strings, celebrating life and love and everything beautiful that lies between ecstasy and melancholy.

After hitting yet another bullseye, these tireless little critters don't let up, and 2004 also brings the recorded debut of Terrestial Tones, the noise side project of Dave Portner with Eric Copeland of Black Dice, as well as the second solo album by Noah Lennox/Panda Bear, titled "Young Prayer" and recorded at the home of old friend and fellow collective member Conrad Deakin. The record is a heartfelt tribute to Lennox's father, who had recently passed away, taking shape as a series of stripped-down, woozy (s)ballads for (almost) just guitar and voice, often without lyrics. While not a landmark release, "Young Prayer" is a moving, deeply felt record that also sheds new light on the more intimate, melodic soul of Animal Collective - one of the few bands around still able to speak the language of primitivist rock in a meaningful way, and one that, without even shying away from markedly pop moments, represents for now a beacon of creativity that is, this time truly, pure and uncontaminated.

2005 brings Feels, an album that quickly becomes a new manifesto for the band. Much of the critical establishment hails the new record as essential, in the name of the pop turn that, this time, would supposedly be fully realized. Caution is warranted, though, because the record - good as it is - also shows more than one early warning sign of a possible dip in quality that, after half a decade of near-flawless releases, seems to be on the horizon. The opening "Did You See The Words" and especially the excellent "Grass" speak the language of the most measured, exquisitely poppy Flaming Lips, only here everything is steeped in the band's now-familiar electronic treacle and a festive, kindergarten-garden mood. The formula, however, starts to feel a bit rote from the following "Flesh Canoe" onward, a heartfelt lysergic invocation still submerged in the sonic stretching that permeates the whole record, and this is only the first instance in which vocal lines accompany these symphonies of layered, bucolic noise, not too far removed from early-90s English shoegaze.

"Bees" lets itself be lulled only by the softest echoes of harp and piano, while dangerously flirting with new age at the same time, as does the following "Banshee Beat", which however also throws in some saving-grace drum machines and lands on one of the record's finest melodies. "Loch Raven" then sounds like the "good" version of the latest Liars, with fairies in place of witches, while the album shakes off its torpor thanks to the closing "Turn Into Something", the most percussive track on the record, which might come across as a pop variant on the sound of the masterpiece Here Comes The Indian.

The risk of slipping into mannerism, then, is genuinely lurking just around the corner, to put it charitably, but nobody is likely to strip Animal Collective of their status as the leaders of the dreamy, Barrett-indebted new electronic pop of the post-2000 era.

2007 is marked by Panda Bear's solo foray, which opens up new horizons for the whole ensemble and for the scene he has by now come to lead.

On Person Pitch (2007), you can picture them right in front of you, these blissed-out hippies clapping their hands and singing in unison, sending up a prayer and a smile to the rising sun. The conductor, the panda-headed figure, the officiant, sings. And you can't stay indifferent to the melody: it flits among reverbs, ambient noise and acoustic details. Meanwhile the hippies double the beat and bring the rite to a close with a great crescendo. And then it's off, with Panda Bear continuing to officiate the Celebration of Melody over a backing that's almost never a rhythm section in the strict sense, but rather a tangle of voices and instruments (guitars, percussion, filtered vocals and little else) pressed up against one another, obsessive and insistent.

There's a touch of Brian Wilson in there, in the vocal delivery and the way the melodies are carried. But there's also a thoroughly modern compositional logic, whereby the song lives entirely in the vocal line, while the instruments form a rhythmic bed assembled according to the logic of the loop and the repetition of the measure, the "break" - which here is a chunk of raw sonic matter rather than a four-to-the-floor groove (though traditional rhythmic textures aren't entirely absent, nor are forays into noise and semi-organized chaos). There's also the somewhat naive sentiment of old-school psychedelic music at play, and there's the extremism of Animal Collective at their very best.

Every portion of the album is a different take on the dichotomy between airy melodies and a solid, timeless musical foundation, whether in festive celebrations ("Bro's" or the first part of "Good Girl/Carrots") or in more meditative moments ("I'm Not", just to name one).

There's not a single flaw, and that's as much a strength as it is a weakness: if you're looking for heterogeneity and schizophrenia, knock on other doors; but if you're willing to let yourself be run over by the train of this strangely likeable hippie, step right up, the doors of the commune are always open.

The blanket of noise that opens "Peacebone" isn't exactly what you'd expect from the new Animal Collective album. Feels, the pop album, the normalization, the successful starting point of a new expressive path: gutted before it's even run its course. The Maryland freaks drop all good intentions, drop the audience, drop the critics. The nerve to think up something new. The solidity with which they pull it off. This is Strawberry Jam (2007).

You can see the building blocks: the electronic pastiches of Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They're Vanished, the refined, polished melodicism of Feels, the drums and excesses of Here Comes The Indian. Yet the result is different, it's yet another deformed mask of these modern-day Holy Modal Rounders. The unbridled vitalism that sets "For Reverend Green" ablaze - a majestic build-up of noise, screams and celebration - the invasive joy of "Peacebone", melodic purity shattering against and conversing with electronic disturbances. Masterpieces of compromise, between primitivism and intellectualism.

The maturity to draw on different solutions: the piano motif tussling with the deep, raucous screams in "Cuckoo Cuckoo", the brief, ultra-pop sketch of "Winter Wonder Land". The sublime "Fireworks", loving delicacy set to the rhythm of bursts, rightly spared from the noise-rock massacre. Releasing only what's truly worthy, escaping formulas, overturning one's own limits: only "Unsolved Mysteries", a nursery rhyme built on repeated guitar figures, falters a little.

Destroying and building at once, Strawberry Jam manages to combine innovation and immediacy, musical exploration and feeling, rationality and emotion.

Animal Collective confirm, once again, that they are one of the most significant bands of the past decade, authors of a blend of madness and playfulness that has no equal in the history of rock.

Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) is nothing but yet another swerve, yet another kaleidoscope. A solid uppercut to anyone wanting to pigeonhole them, their categories, their declared and undeclared influences.

The folk component of their early work has almost vanished, and with it the guitars. Dominating the scene today is a viscous electronic sound, taking shape from the most disturbed moments of the previous record ("Peacebone").

Geologist - more than ever the band's dominus - on one hand papers the tracks with murky, muffled layers that fill up the space; on the other, he charges them with pulsations and driving beats. This highly original garb leaves little room for traditional instrumentation, just the odd arpeggio, the odd piano motif, and a varied array of percussion. The result is a dense, pasty psychedelia, able to reshape itself according to whatever melodic input the group chooses to follow.

This is where Animal Collective truly win the game, reclaiming the madness of tracks like "Grass" and "Fireworks" and combining it with more relaxed moments. While songs like "Also Frightened" and "Lion in a Coma" recapture the vein of "Sgt. Pepper's" and its successors, the timeless eighties stride of "Bluish" leaps a few years forward, immersing itself in a "Loveless"-style atmosphere. Even more striking is the irresistible nursery-rhyme of "Brothersport", literally run over by techno rails.

Animal Collective don't give up their primitivist fantasies when it comes to intertwining voices and melodies. Standing out is "Summertime Clothes", a euphoric electronic carousel shot through with watery beats and undercurrents of primordial voices. No less impressive are other delights like the sudden explosion of "In The Flowers" - which overwhelms delicate arpeggios - or the Lennox-like "My Girls", pure melodic grandeur. But it's the whole flow that truly astonishes, even when the digression is little more than a connective passage ("Daily Routine").

In short, Merriweather Post Pavilion is nothing more than one long electronic pastiche of psychedelic pop, with Animal Collective dragging this sound into modern times. In the end, it's the same feat they once pulled off with folk music on that masterpiece titled Here Comes The Indian. And it's alongside that very album that Merriweather Post Pavilion takes its place, among the peaks of the discography of this extraordinary New York band.

Not long after this latest show of greatness, the band takes on the Lynchian task of putting a dreamlike dimension on film. Aided by director Danny Perez, they bring to life ODDSAC. For the occasion, music and images feed off each other, interpenetrating to shape a surreal, elusive world made up of dreamlike images with no narrative link, yet strung together like one long, intoxicating stream of consciousness. There's no hint of a plot, just images and sounds clinging to one another, asking only for a space in the mind of whoever experiences them. Nature is still the great protagonist, but a nature with blurred edges, motionless yet fluid, and populated by spirits. The quartet's sound turns much more toward dark territory, with a far more invasive use of electronic repetition and the near-total disappearance of the song form, save for a few rare exceptions.

A postmodern trip, between nocturnes, bursts of color and nature as a backdrop. The depiction of a dream, or perhaps an attempt to overlay multiple visions into a single dream, masterfully summed up in a work that shows a new guise for a group of artists staking their claim as the great gurus of video-music avant-garde of the 2010s.

Panda Bear returns in 2011 with Tomboy, an album that, compared to its predecessor, has a relatively more organic sound and a consistent tracklist, free of real weak spots but also lacking truly memorable moments.

Aside from the twilight desolation of "Scheherezade" and the sixteenth-note ecstasy of "Drone", the whole record is yet another celebration of a technicolor, minimalist and layered melodicism that looks to Brian Wilson's psychedelic-pop dream with sincere admiration. By now fully immersed and completely at ease in this vividly colorful wonderland, Noah Lennox raises, from a relatively less oblique angle, mantras that are genuine invocations to God ("You Can Count On Me", "Benfica"), thickening sound sources around a guitar twang that pushes the enchantment towards a hyper-amplified choral intimacy (the title track), while "Slow Motion" dances "repetition" with an underwater-tinged shuffle.

Meticulously built, Tomboy depicts an artist who is confident in handling the tools of his trade, more measured in his vocal harmonies and in structuring a song form that proceeds through reiterations charged with a diamond-like brightness ("Surfer's Hymn", "Last Night At The Jetty" and a tropically-tinged "Afterburner"), a worldly liturgy pursuing an analgesic trance - even if at times the overall result feels a bit flat or, at least, uncertain (among others, "Alsatian Darn" and, above all, "Friendship Bracelet").

Three and a half years. That's how long the follow-up to Merriweather Post Pavilion. Centipede Hz took to arrive, a red-hot cauldron, chili peppers and spicy seasoning in great abundance. What's inside? The Animal Collective you'd expect. But also not. 

Where this new album is headed is far from clear - maybe even to them. In the sense that it doesn't pick up the legacy of its predecessor at all; if anything, it reworks some of its ideas, while bringing back into play everything the New York band's universe has always represented. So: chaos, organization (?), overlapping layers, drum machines, chants, broken trails of sound. All of it steeped in a trance that smells of Africa, of pounding bongos. A kind of (dis)organized prog for the third millennium, in a pop flavor (where Fuck Buttons embody its electronic side). Back to 2004, back to big guitars. Maybe less electronic, but there's a whiff of space in every single track. Back to free-folk, in short - Here Comes The Indian comes back to life a little, and so does the gorgeous Sung Tongs.

"New Town Burnout" is exactly where it's aiming, between a seriously crooked rhythm, a gait like walking on a sheet of glass, and vocals full of sudden high notes. You can clearly hear that famous Finnish school of old: Kemialliset Ystävät and Es above all. "Applausace" and "Today's Supernatural", in their simplicity, glide effortlessly along that pop ridge which the Animal boys, true tightrope walkers, manage to walk with great ease. There's a lot of sweating, a lot of moving around, utterly uncoordinated of course. Just as a steady loop seems to kick in, it gets cut short. And then wonderfully sloppy sixties harmonies for "Moonjock", a hippie stroll through woods and bright green meadows for "Rosie Oh", fairy-tale delirium in "Father Time". This is a record that moves at a frantic pace, perhaps more than ever in their career. There's no real pause, and "Centipede Hz" emerges, once again and after several years in their career, not as an album of songs but as a flow, a ferocious magma. It's a schizophrenia worthy of the best Flaming Lips, with clumpy, thick sounds flung in every direction. "Monkey Riches" speeds up the pulse, "Mercury Man", so to speak, slows things down, "Pulleys" is the usual - delightful - chant they know how to pull off so well. The carousel comes to a stop, and "Amanita" is its perfect summary.

Theirs is the same undying psychedelia, thriving on ideas and ever-colorful backdrops. Sweltering temperatures, a sweat-drenched summer. Here's a record that tells that story perfectly. Hallucination calling hallucination. Again and again.

Avey Tare has also launched his own solo career, first with his now ex-wife Kria Brekkan (formerly of Mum) for the "automatic" folk-psych of Pullhair Rubeye (2007), and then on his own for the electronic manipulations of Down There. In 2013 he then begins his second artistic life by forming Slasher Flicks (Angel Deradoorian, who had in the meantime left Dirty Projectors, and drummer Jeremy Hyman of the now-disbanded Ponytail), for the uneven debut Enter The Slasher House (2014). Solo again, albeit surrounded by top-tier guests, he then delivers Eucalyptus (2017), intended as a requiem of contrition and self-criticism aiming to return to authentic free-folk roots, but in the end amounting to little more than an album of filler. Cows On Hourglass Pond (2019) reignites the primitivist fire of his early days, with the electronic layering still present but recast in a lighter key, less dense and submerged than in his previous work. The acoustic elements are almost always front and center in the mix, there's a renewed interest in rhythm that shakes off the torpor, and the proverbial lopsided logorrhea of the Maryland shaman is never stifled or labored but, if anything, more alive than ever - diluted without ever being fully submerged.

Meanwhile Noah Lennox continues his glorious solo path with Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper (2015), once again produced by Peter Kember and preceded by the EP "Mr Noah". The Baltimore kid, by now permanently settled in Portugal, assembles another admirable digital patchwork along the lines of the previous record: so electronics are given free rein, with the declared intent of condensing the magic of his melodic genius into ever fuller and more tightly framed sonic vignettes.

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is a vital, pulsing record full of interesting flashes, though it perhaps lacks a true standout. The two singles "Mr Noah" and "Boys Latino" confirm Lennox's extraordinary knack for pulling out dense, sticky refrains from the very first listen, in a first half of the album where the electronic treacle of "Crossword" is perhaps the most pop fragment and the one potentially most accessible to a wider audience. 

Meanwhile Lennox's ethereal voice wriggles free from the metallic, claustrophobic whirlpools of "Come To Your Senses", once again revealing the by-now well-tested coexistence of vocal sweetness and harmonies with the layered, swampy beat carpets borrowed from the Collective. A pairing that, as mentioned, doesn't always deliver the hoped-for results (the flat "Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker" and "Principe Real").

We've thus reached the throbbing heart of the record, a stream of consciousness that flows into the muffled, underwater atmospheres of "Tropic Of Cancer", where a gentle arpeggio accompanies the rarefied, moving and beautiful dedication to his father, who died prematurely of a brain tumor and to whom, for over ten years now, Lennox never fails to speak (“When they said he’s ill / laughed it off as if it’s no big deal / What a joke to joke, no joke…and you can’t get back, you won’t come back, you can’t come back to it”). An intimate tension that we also find in the following "Lonely Wanderer", a legitimate offspring of that avant-folk masterpiece that goes by the name of Feels, with the Panda reciting his prayer to the sky over a tear-jerking piano progression while electronic reverbs and angelic vocalizations flutter all around. Two utterly pure gems, out of step with the decidedly more dynamic context of the rest of the album.

The smile and the light shine again on "Selfish Gene", an analog nod to the Beach Boys' Californian dream, before arriving at the mantra of "Acid Wash", which reopens the doors of that celestial commune created in 2007, the year "Person Pitch" revealed itself to the world in all its splendor.

A year after the "Grim Reaper" chronicled by Panda, in February 2016 Animal Collective return with Painting With, their eleventh album (yet another with the three-piece lineup, without Deakin).

The single "FloriDada" had shown us a band in fine form, hinting at a certain continuity with the recent electronic turn of Centipede Hz. A rain of LSD-soaked confetti, a technicolor party driven by fluorescent electronics, bongos and primordial percussion, with the usual interplay between Panda Bear's beautiful Wilson-esque voice and Avey Tare's irresistible childlike exuberance. The very concept of happiness summed up in four minutes of music. 

We had convinced ourselves that “FloriDada” was the litmus test of Animal Collective's “brand new sound,” perhaps the clearest example yet of the band's ongoing musical revolution, one that breaks free from the flowery, freak-folk paths of their early days (and from the rarefied sunshine-pop psychedelia of Merryweather Post Pavillion) to speed headlong down synthetic highways, into psychotic electronics, doubled-up vocals and increasingly unstable, lopsided appetites. 

Well, as predicted, Painting With turns out to be a sprawling, unruly postmodern funfair in which to lose yourself amid hall-of-mirrors tricks, strobe lights, kaleidoscopes and runaway roller coasters. Yet another lucid dream from a band that no longer has anything to prove, that wants to have fun and entertain as perhaps never before. In clear continuity with its predecessor – and as in Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper – there's no trace of acoustic guitars here, no semblance of balance or homogeneity. The melody is ultra-compressed and ground down by the electronic mincer, and the listener is constantly kept off balance, tossed about and disoriented by sounds, pulses and drones bombarding them from every side.

The round, infinite spaces of Feels and the aforementioned Merryweather give way to claustrophobia, jagged lysergia, a synthetic monolith spinning on its own axis that, when it doesn't risk losing focus (as too often happened on Centipede), is still capable of dazzling with its beauty. And credit is due for the perfect interlocking of Animal Collective's two vocal souls, Panda Bear and Avey Tare, who work in unison more than ever this time around, doubling and covering each other, overtaking and blending into one another, multiplying from track to track. 

And so it becomes easy to picture the metallic hands keeping time on “Spilling Guts” and the schizophrenic flights of “The Burglars”, while “Summing The Wretch” turns out to be an unmissable robotic nursery rhyme and the fine “Golden Gal” bursts with Beach Boys-ish life and flavor. It must be said there are less convincing passages, especially in the first half of the record (the muddled “Hocus Pocus”, the quicksand of “Lying In The Grass” and the weak “Vertical”, tracks that might redeem themselves with a few more listens).

But the real feat of this album is undoubtedly “On Delay”. Without exaggeration, “On Delay” is probably the perfect summa of Animal Collective's entire discography up to this point: celestial harmonies and assorted noise, carpets of piano and synthesizers, synthetic pulsations and journeys into deepest space. There's past and present, bucolic appetites and city traffic, “Turn Into Something” and “Rosie Oh”, “Did You See The Words” and “Applesauce”. In short, for this writer, an absolute masterpiece. 

Painting With is a sincere, colorful and joyful album. A happy parenthesis in a career increasingly opening up to new electronic horizons, one in which a track like “Natural Selection” could be filed away as their first genuine dance experiment.

It may sound obvious, yet never more than now have we all needed to listen to music that is sincere, colorful and joyful. The hallucination keeps calling for new hallucination. We couldn't be happier about it.

In 2018 the Baltimore boys try their hand again at the audio-visual format and release Tangerine Reef: Avey Tare, Geologist and Deakin are on board, while Panda Bear is missing from the roll call. Made together with Coral Morphologic, a duo made up of marine biologist Colin Foord and producer J.D. McKay, who blend art and science to introduce the world to the fluorescent beauty of coral, Tangerine Reef is to all intents and purposes a film/documentary inspired by the creatures that populate the reef. A tribute to the "International Year of the Reef" that also serves as a warning to our generation and those to come, urging the conservation of aquatic ecosystems and raising awareness of the ongoing climate crisis, which could one day deprive us of these and other masterpieces of nature.

It must be said right away that the record is heavily shaped by this watery, reflective mood, weighed down by the depths of the ocean and the absence of natural light to illuminate its contours. What timidly surfaces is a liquid, mushy, rarefied, dark sound, utterly devoid of any structure or song-form. But what makes this work difficult and almost completely inaccessible is the lack of a memorable refrain, of a melodic turn that might stick with the listener or at least be hummed back (the absence of Noah Lennox is keenly felt here), together with the repetition of synthetic textures that are at times evocative but, it must be said, all too often tedious or even cloying. Avey Tare's voice sounds sedated and melancholy here, as if certifying the resigned, inevitable defeat of the sea's creatures at the hands of human stupidity and shallowness.

Of course, it's worth remembering that this isn't a “pop” project in the strict sense, but rather a meditative, almost hypnagogic experience, in its own way removed from everything Animal Collective has produced so far. That premise, however, only partly justifies the sense of latent stasis that eventually wears down and hampers the listening experience. There's little point dwelling on individual songs, which aren't really “songs” at all, but the overall impression is of a sound too closed in on itself and its own, however noble, intentions, utterly inseparable from the film's images (which, to be fair, are quite striking).

In short, detached from its visual context, the music of Tangerine Reef (or rather, its indistinct flow of electronic fragments) doesn't stand on its own and belongs only to the darkness of the ocean floor it seems to come from. If you have a friend unlucky enough to have never approached Animal Collective, unless they happen to be a big fan of National Geographic documentaries, do them a favor and keep them well away from these menacing depths. The Collective's real treasures lie elsewhere, still up there on the surface, having emerged and been bathed in warm sunlight for years now.

After the world tour that saw Lennox and Portner perform Sung Tongs live in its entirety, 2019 marks Noah's return with his fifth record under the Panda Bear name. Recorded at the same studios as Person Pitch and with the same producer, Rusty Santos, who also had a hand in the aforementioned Sung Tongs, Buoys noticeably slows things down and stands as the shortest, most reflective and minimal album in Lennox's catalog. Guitars return (at last!) as a constant counterpoint to the ever-present digital samples, here pared down to a minimum and far less obsessive and pulsing. The feeling with “Buoys” is of tiptoeing through a freer, more open space that's still never truly empty, where melody can almost be breathed in, percussion disappears, and the voice grows less otherworldly and fluttering than usual. No more invocations to the divine, no more mantras launched into hyperspace, but a notable move closer to the listener, with vocal tracks kept front and center in the mix and tinged with an ever-present, more or less constant autotune.

In short, this is a record built to a very high degree from the lysergic mists of Animal Collective's past, where the tradition of freak-folk and droney modernity seek out – and almost always find – their balance. Here, the Festival of Melody in Panda's commune becomes a moment of meditation and quiet reflection, a safe harbor to hide in for half an hour away from the schizophrenia of our city lives. Songs that could be replayed with a six-string on the beach, at times fresh and luminous (the almost radio-friendly title track, “Cracked” with its surprising near-r&b vocal, the sugary “Master”), at times darker and more contemplative (above all the hypnotic “Inner Monologue”, perhaps the one true moment where Noah lifts his gaze and his voice to the sky). An unexpected direction, considering the two tracks already released a few weeks earlier: “Dolphins”, with its watery, almost indecipherable structure, and above all the hyperbole of “Token”, which builds itself piece by piece, grows rich with surging effects and multitracked voices until it detonates into a sing-along, perhaps the record's only true sing-along. 

Although “Buoys” may, on first listen, seem too brief, cold and listless a parenthesis for those used to full, dense compositions coated in psychedelic syrup, we can't help but appreciate this minimalist-leaning return from Panda Bear. A return to the past with an eye on the future, to campfire acoustics wrapped in sound effects that bounce, buzz and zip around everywhere, to the youthful prayers of a young man who still looks to Brian Wilson's lucid dreams with genuine admiration.

With Panda Bear back in the fold, 2022 sees AnCo return to the spotlight with the excellent Time Skiffs, an album that finds the Baltimore quartet approaching their distinctive sonic constructions with greater serenity, without the frenzy – admirable as it was – of the past.

The result is decidedly interesting, projecting their project into uncharted territory.

Along the way, there's no rush to fill every microscopic bit of available space with sound, or to make abrupt 180-degree turns midway through a track, because the direction is now dictated by rhythmic patterns, fixed to arrangements that embrace a certain degree of repetition without doing any harm, chasing instead the highest level of elegance.

These concepts are perfectly embodied in the opener "Dragon Slayer" and especially in the nearly seven minutes of the single "Strung With Everything", an evocative, sun-drenched sonic meditation that portrays the dialogue between two friends gathered to watch the world shattering before their eyes.

The excellent "Prester John", after a simple introductory progression, a buoyant drum pattern and fluttering keyboards, finds relief in euphonious vocal interplay. The noisy backdrop slowly rises to the fore, swallowing up everything else: a symbolic representation of their ability to transmute every tiny detail into a broad vision of avant-garde instrumentalism.

Panda Bear & Co. have sacrificed a good deal of spontaneity in favor of an objective pursuit of cohesion. The group now craves a happy existence, probably brought on by a newfound personal maturity and serenity, and it was only a matter of time before such conditions began to seep into their artistic expression.

Therefore, while it doesn't have the impact of albums like Merriweather Post Pavilion or Strawberry Jam, Time Skiffs is the most accessible record in their discography, preserving intact every minute drop of quality that these four heroic experimenters have always stamped onto their creations.

The historic partnership between Panda Bear and Peter Kember of Spacemen 3 was cemented in 2022 with the release of their first album written entirely as a joint effort.

Reset was born out of listening to doo-wop and rock 'n' roll tracks from the '50s and '60s, records that found their way back into Peter Kember aka Sonic Boom's hands during his move to Portugal, made precisely to be closer to his friend and collaborator Lennox, who had relocated to Lisbon with his wife years earlier. Savoring those old sounds in a brand-new place gave those works an unprecedented texture, recontextualized and revitalized.

Kember laid down the first building blocks of the new arrangements using phrases taken directly from some of those tracks, sampling them and looping them. He then sent these sketches to Lennox, inviting him to write new parts over them.

Indeed, the most persistent quality that emerges from listening to "Reset" is exactly this reassuring ease, built from elaborations that start from far away.

With the onset of the pandemic, Lennox and Kember probably found comfort in the predictability of these compositions, affectionate and full of hope, conceived in a historical period that channeled optimism, and it's precisely thanks to this blend of contrasting feelings that "Reset" sounds upbeat, while still reflecting today's turbulent modern times.

A strange, brilliant album, full of psychedelic pop songs that break down the boundaries of time, with samples embellished by synthesizers, hums and syrupy melodies. But while the music evokes the soft haze of nostalgia, the lyrics reflect the rot sitting at the core of today's global experience: an effervescence and brightness heavily undermined by the insurmountable darkness of the words.

Contributions by Luca Fusari ("Person Pitch"), Marco Pagliariccio ("Oddsac"), Francesco Nunziata ("Tomboy") and Alberto Asquini ("Fall Be Kind" and "Centipede Hz"), Lorenzo Bruno ("Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper", "Painting With", "Tangerine Reef", "Buoys"), Cristiano Orlando ("Time Skiffs" and "Reset")

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