animal collective

The lyrics to Who Could Win a Rabbit might almost be a missions statement. It's basically a 'fuck the world' song, but instead of going 'relax, feel love, hold hands' or all of that, it's 'habit or rabbit rabbit or a rib habit or rabbit rabbit or a rib' The habit in this case being nuns uniform, the rabbit being anarchist farm getaway, and a rib being wordplay.

I think a better candidate for a group that people stopped caring about after the Bush administration ended is The Thermals.

So I listened to Sung Tongs with the lyric sheet from Genius, and there's a bunch of rage in there, confusion, abdication. But also, the last three songs, uhm, they're all about sex, and that's not really something AnCo was that good at describing.

Dog of height in the trees
Won't you come down doggy
Such a sweet doggy
I brought you your dinner
My doggy I miss you kissing from my palm

I remember when I first got you doggy

But you lay there so still doggy
You lay there
So still

Dog who fell to the ground
Twisted your neck doggy
Don't look right doggy
The vet came with sutures
He said "Dave
Hey the doctor cannot save your dog"

But I remember when I first got you dog

But you lay there so still doggy
You lay there
So still

Dog of depth in the dirt
They buried you deep doggy
You're the best doggy
My friend has a doggy
She's real nice dog
I wish you could chase her round my yard

I remember when I first got you dog

there ya go, i think a lot of people that think of them as this silly fuck-off band never read the lyrics. ^ Doggy is a great example, the whole Campfire Songs album is incredibly sad. the artwork for Spirit and Feels depict this children's book, henry darger fantasy gone wrong. look at the lyrics for Daffy Duck, one of the songs mentioned above, and it's not exactly some Pollyanna goof off. Feels, their "love record," is full of unrequited love and longing and loss:

What I need is good advice
Cooked on plates around me
Rubber hands and silly friends
Pasted on my wall

Someone salt
A sweet sea soup
That I could swim in proudly
We might swim like laughing ducks
In your pink lagoon

There we go changing again
There we go again

My hands can make yours
Warm again
If not absorbed in blankets
Are you in need of teen angst
And nibble on your neck?

And if I had volcano boots
For swimming in volcanoes
Do you know the origins of laughing ducks?
Oh what's a matter with those birds?

There we go changing again
There we go again

What you need's a happy farm
With happy goats and sheep
What I need's a happy arm
To swing ya 'round like father

Re Doggy, it's sad but also infantile. It's infantile, but in a performative way. It's kinda creepy. I'm not sure I like it, particularly, and I definitely prefer AnCo when they're much more noisy and explicitly ugly.

i don't think it's infantile, it's just plain spoken and wistful. idk about it being 'performative' - i've been seeing this used a lot lately as a buzzword, essentially meaning 'inauthentic,' and i don't think that fits Doggy at all, or any of their songs. you could call AC a lot of things but i don't think they were ever inauthentic - their appeal was the intense and palpable emotion and energy that they gave off. Doggy might be one of the most straightforward songs they've ever written. Spirit is the best combo of the melancholy of the acoustic stuff and the explicit ugliness of their noisest stuff.

It's definitely infantile, it's regressing into a trauma from childhood, rather than dealing with the present. What I mean by 'performative' is stuff like the constant use of 'doggy', which continues even though it's made it's point. It's as if Avey Tare knows that he's a grownup pretending to be a little boy, and that's not so much 'inauthentic' as it's healthy.

I mean, AnCo were performative. They weren't animals. They weren't tigers. They were 'inauthentic' if we think authenticity means meaning what one says. They didn't, they were in character. But the characters communicated emotion as well. That's not true of stuff like My Girls and Brother Sport, though, which definitely seems to mean what it says.

It's definitely infantile, it's regressing into a trauma from childhood, rather than dealing with the present. What I mean by 'performative' is stuff like the constant use of 'doggy', which continues even though it's made it's point. It's as if Avey Tare knows that he's a grownup pretending to be a little boy, and that's not so much 'inauthentic' as it's healthy.

Gotcha. I think this is otm - when you said infantile, i was thinking of a literal infant throwing a temper tantrum, maybe something like the untitled third track on Spirit. it's definitely regressing (or revisiting?) into boyhood trauma.

I mean, AnCo were performative. They weren't animals. They weren't tigers. They were 'inauthentic' if we think authenticity means meaning what one says. They didn't, they were in character. But the characters communicated emotion as well. That's not true of stuff like My Girls and Brother Sport, though, which definitely seems to mean what it says.

i'm not sure about this - the whole being in character and dressing up in face paint and masks stopped after the Here Comes the Indian era in 2002. i never really bought the bit that they were in character after that, sure they had stage names but the lyrics became much more personal and they certainly didn't present themselves as characters on stage. just because they're singing "we tigers we tigers WOO!" doesn't mean they're pretending to be tigers. their shows became much less tribalistic after 2006 - by the next year they had already written MPP and were playing most of those songs live, and like you said, that record was their most straightforward yet (lyrically and musically).

Ever wonder why we stopped giving a fuck about Animal Collective in 2009? Early 2009, never forget. We got Merriweather Post Pavillion BEFORE Barack Obama was sworn in. Ever consider that album was like the celebration at the end of the Bush administration? That all their psych-folk tendencies were just a natural reaction to living in W's America? But now that new blood was entering office, their old ways wouldn't be as potent?

That's so tenuous you might as well say their fall-off was a reaction to swine flu or the Gaza War or the death of Michael Jackson. It felt even at the time that MPP was a final destination rather than a stepping stone.

In other news this is dark and great and should have been on Strawberry Jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rvPX8UlQ78

Shit, silly band. Shit, silly music.

xp Safer is a great song, and I see that it's been appended as the last track on SJ on all streaming/digital services... I still think they screwed up the production on SJ by going in the opposite direction as Feels. SJ has barely any reverb, none of the vocals (except Panda's) are double-tracked, all of the buildups and transitions were cut and the songs were consolidated... this approach worked better for the songs on MPP, and they got the atmosphere on that record right, but SJ would've benefitted from that gauzy, hummy sound of Feels. it would've been the darker/twisted twin of the lovey dovey Feels.

they corrected course when they mixed the Water Curses EP, there's more space and texture to the vocals. Street Flash is an SJ outtake and most days it's my favorite song by them...

I love Strawberry Jam. Not all the transitions were cut, For Reverend Green into Fireworks might be the best one-two they ever did. Besides that I think the record benefits from the constant switch between songs, whereas something like Sung Tongs gets stuck in each mood for too long.

sung tongs shits all over strawberry jam from a great height tho!

xp that's true, i think they nailed those two songs and the transition between them. i'm probably biased because I saw them play most of SJ + Safer & Street Flash about a year and a half before the record came out, and they played the songs in that murky, drawn out Feels style. it's like how a lot of people upthread said years ago, Feels was a letdown for them because they were first exposed to those songs live and they were much louder, more raw, noisey. and the record ended up being more sedate and pretty. but since I heard Feels first, it remains my favorite, a perfect record imo, and i can appreciate the live recordings of that era on their own.

i'd rank the imperial phase as:

feels > sung tongs > spirit > mpp > indian > hollindagain > danse > campfire > sj

x-post: Nah. None of them are as good as Here Comes the Indian though.

Indian > SJ > CHz > Sung Tongs > MPP > Feels > Spirits > Danse > Campfire

I should relisten to Spirits though. Also to figure out what to vote for..

glad to see you included CHz, and so high! i think that's a great, messy, complicated record that I still haven't quite cottoned to completely, although I think "Moonjock" is one of the most riveting things they've ever done. i only excluded CHz and Painting With (which I love, too) because MPP was definitely a culmination for them, and they drastically slowed down. they used to put out multiple things a year, and ever since the turn of the decade, it's been 3-4 years between records.

When I saw them live after CHz, they did Moonjock into What Would I Want, Sky? for an opening 15 minutes in 7/8. That got bad reviews.

oof, sounds sweet. i only saw one CHz era show, right at the very end when they rescheduled some shows in December 2013. i was burnt out after being such a hardcore fan for five years that i skipped their two pavilion shows in 2011/12. really regretting it now. the two times I saw them this year they were so great, new songs are so much better live

Listening to Centipede Hz for the first time in forever and it is holding up a lot better than I remember.

Now I'm listening to Painting With for the first time since it came out. "Floridada" is easily one of their worst songs. The album improves immensely if you don't let that opener spoil your appetite for more.

The Deakin song always kills my interest when I listen to Centipede Hz. I suppose I could skip it.

Yeah I could never get into Wide Eyed. mostly because the premise is so daft. I feel like after MPP, the AC started to fulfill all the dumbest stereotypes that people pinned on them: psychedelic drugs and craaaaaaaaazy graphics and tie dye and nonsense animal lyrics (the very ending of Applesauce).

by the way, if anyone hasn't listened to the new album or any of this year's shows, I highly recommend this recording from a couple weeks ago in New York (done by NYCtaper, so the quality is sweet). imo this live era has been one of their best, they're using more modular synths instead of samples and it's really opened up the songs and made each show pretty distinct. the Jimmy Mack cover is wild, they've been doing it all year and it's really become the centerpiece of the shows, sort of like the new Brother Sport. Avey has been going off on these wild harangues in the middle, sort of like a Southern Baptist minister.

https://archive.org/details/acollective2016-11-02.t5

01. Recycling
02. Lying in the Grass
03. Golden Gal
04. Summing the Wretch
05. Loch Raven
06. On Delay
07. Jimmy Mack [Martha Reeves and The Vandellas]
08. Water Curses
09. FloriDada
10. The Burglars
11. Kids on Holiday
---
13. Hocus Pocus
14. Guys Eyes
15. Summertime Clothes

banimal bollective

that nyctaper gig is great! feels like jimmy mack is taking the place of (the possibly overdone or in need of a rest) fireworks.

sweet hour-long interview with noah and brian https://soundcloud.com/noeffectsshow/72-animal-collective

New Avey Tare is fairly good. Not quite as good as Meeting of the Waters, but sorta the same sound, and much better than I'd expected. These guys are having a much better 2017 than I would have thought.

Still haven't heard it, waiting for my LP to ship 🙃

haha my friend doesn't like them because 'they sound like the beatles'.
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, February 6, 2004 6:30 PM (fourteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't know they'd released music since 2012

been playing fireworks on repeat for a week. beautiful melody, and the change halfway through... agh. avey has a magic touch underneath that sea of electronics. go back to 'spirit they're gone' for his whimsical, ethereal, fantastical bare songwriting. i swear that album is so unique - sonically, dynamically. never heard anything like it.

oh, no! my singing voice is gone! my singing voice is gone! my singing voice is gone!

new album Tangerine Reef out August 17.

https://static.stereogum.com/uploads/2018/07/Animal-Collective-Tangerine-Reef-1531756837-640x640.jpg

1. Hair Cutter
2. Buffalo Tomato
3. Inspector Gadget
4. Buxom
5. Coral Understanding
6. Airpipe (To a New Transition)
7. Jake and Me
8. Coral by Numbers
9. Hip Sponge
10. Coral Realization
11. Lundsten Coral
12. Palythoa
13. Best of Times (Worst of All)

"Hair Cutter" is really cool, sounds a lot like the calmer moments on Here Comes the Indian.

new song debuted last night in Atlanta at the first show of the US Sung Tongs tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DQH5KFbCU8

3. Inspector Gadget

Could you BEEEEE any more....?

Saw the Sung Tongs show in LA and, aside from a few moments, really disliked it. I love the album but watching these two grown men sing infantile gibberish really hammered home how dumb the whole endeavor is. Made me appreciate the way they grew on later albums—Fuller, noisier, more complex. This show felt less like revisiting old material than regressing to a lesser state.

ha, right on. they peaked at their first album if you ask me. aside a couple of cuts on later LPs, everything else is silly bollocks.

I was surprised by my own reaction though because I absolutely did not go into this show as a hater. In fact I’ve seen them twice before—on the MPP tour at the Troubador, one of my all-time favorite shows ever; and a few years later at Hollywood Bowl, a decent show with big high points. I think there’s something to recommend in nearly all of their albums and the run up to and including MPP is pretty remarkable. Something about seeing them in this stripped down fashion though, really deflated the experience. Judging by the crowd reaction I may have been alone in this feeling.

pgwp maybe alone in it, but fair for you to feel how you do

saw them on strawberry jam tour, in which they mostly played material from Merriweather. Honestly these guys are insufferable to me now, though the sung tongs pitchfork performance was a nice bit of nostalgia. I have most of their records and EPs but would likely give them away for free if anyone wants to pay postage

always interested in AC vinyl, ILXmail me if you're serious.

no vinyl sorry, should have said CDs

I have water curses, prospect hummer, sung tongs, merriweather..etc

no worries, someone else might take you up on that though! still don't think I've heard Water Curses but boy do I hate Avey's "yelp" style vocals that pop up in the later work with distressing frequency

yeah, otm

strawberry jam seemed to avey taking over way more and making it his own roadshow. the panda songs were always the best IMO

*seemed to find

Feels reissued on vinyl today, unreleased live recording uploaded: 8/22/04 - Neumo's - Seattle, WA

wastered
did you see the words
kids on holiday
people
loch raven
banshee beat
the purple bottle

finally listened to "Painting With" and it's...kinda fun actually? I mean I get that this and Centipede don't feel special the way MPP did but they're still pretty neat, I feel like if a different band had recorded those records they would've been much better received

I recommend the live recordings they've released from the PW tour. I like the album but it honestly felt more like a justification to tour and put on that amazing show. The lack of transitions is what sinks the album for me- they're jumping off points. the whole sound palette of this record was really well suited to extended transitions and blending. the album is too discreet for me

DISCRETE

(sorry)