On first listen, this feels like the best new Animal Collective music since 2012's Centipede Hz. I love the way the song seemingly emerges from ambiance, and that the track allows a full 90 seconds of that ambiance to return at the end.
Their next album, Time Skiffs, is set for release on February 4, 2022.
Animal Collective at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago yesterday. The three new songs after In the Flowers are Car Keys, Dragon Slayer, and Soul Capturer, all of which will presumably appear on their next album.
Another new song, Prester John, follows Unsolved Mysteries and No More Running. They were in the middle of a fifth new song, Royal (downdowndown), when the video unexpectedly cuts out. The second video (below) picks up during Fickle Cycle, followed by a rousing version of The Purple Bottle.
Here's Animal Collective performing a socially-distanced, pandemic-style, Zoom video of the song Rain In Cups from their recent Bridge To Quiet EP.
It's a lovely song, but I especially like Geologist's Thinking Feller's Union Local 282 t-shirt. I saw them perform in Albany, NY back in the late 1980s (or possible very early 90s).
Here's a video of Animal Collective performing in Halloween costume at the Nouveau Casino in Paris back in 2005. Interestingly, their album Feels just came out earlier that month but they opened the set with two songs from Strawberry Jam (which wouldn't even be released for another two years). They also played Fireworks from Strawberry Jam later in the set. It gives you a good idea of how long they were work-shopping some of these songs live before they committed them to record.
Set list and track start times are as follows:
For Reverend Green (0:57)
Chores (5:29)
Grass (11:27)
Safer (16:45)
Banshee Beat (25:50)
We Tigers (36:10)
Fireworks (40:31)
Flash Canoe (49:52)
The Purple Bottle (54:57)
Kids on Holiday (1:05:05)
Nouveau Casino is a small venue and night club at 109 rue Oberkampf, Paris (11th arrondissement) famed for its underground bookings and very Parisian architecture and decoration.. More than 2 million people have visited and more than 2000 artists have performed.
For this once-every-four-years Leap Day, let's go back 14 years and give a listen to Animal Collective at T In The Park, a 2006 music festival in Balado, Kinross.
Reportedly, that's somewhere in Scotland.
For Reverend Green is from Animal Collective's 2007 LP Strawberry Jam. This is one of my all-time favorite AC songs because:
That opening loop sounds like what a carnival carousel might sound like on acid. I had always assumed the loop was an organ or synth, but watching this live video reveals that it's actually a highly distorted electric guitar.
Panda Bear's drumming. I'm no expert, but it sound like he's playing in 2/4 or 4/8 for one line, and then 7/8 on the next. Does that make it 11/16?.
Avey Tare screams a lot at unexpected times (it's an acquired taste, but once you get used to it, it sounds great), and sometimes he sings "For Reverend Green" as "Forever in green."
The segue on the LP from For Reverend Green to the next track, Fireworks, is one of the best 1-2 transitions in all of rock music.
Animal Collective were performing their cover of Jimmy Mack during their most recent tour in support of Painting With, and now it appears they're including a studio version of the song on their The Painters EP, which drops, like, tomorrow.
Animal Collective are continuing their tradition of releasing a companion EP following one of their studio albums and have announced that The Painters EP, the follow-up to Painting With, will be released February 17 (this Friday).
We'll be honest with you, friends, and be open and truthful in much the same manner as Damien Jurado was on Thursday night at The Earl - we haven't been doing very well. The election and the prospect of four year of a Trump presidency really have us down. We try not to think about it, we try to reconcile ourselves with it, we try to find that still, quiet spot in the center of our mind, but we still want to punch our fist through a wall.
Music has been, at best, a distraction for us, but we haven't heard anything since November 8th that made us think, "Yes, everything is going to be alright." Or at least, "Okay, life sucks, but here's a way to make it better." We've been listening to a lot of Thee Silver Mount Zion Orchestra lately, reveling in their moodiness and shifts from extreme pessimism to cautious optimism, but then to be honest, we had been listening to them a lot before the election as well, so nothing's really changed there.
We're desperately waiting for the next big, game-changing record, the breakout album by a new band - or redirection by an old band - that would have the same effect on our consciousness as, say, Fear of Music by The Talking Heads, or London's Calling by The Clash, or even early Arcade Fire or LCD Soundsystem - something so compelling and innovative that it will restore our hope for the future.
We could include some of Animal Collective's breakout recordings in that list of breakthroughs, but to be brutally frank, they haven't been bringing it lately. They seem to have reached some sort of peak with Merriweather Post Pavilion (which isn't even their best record), and since then have been actively backing away from issuing any kind of music that might even suggest they were interested in trying to top that earlier peak.
This live set isn't that return to form, or our sought-after sonic reason to keep on living. But we caught Animal Collective's tour here in Atlanta back in May, and this recording from New York's Terminal 5 on November 2 (a week before Election Day) finds them much further down the road with the new songs from Painting With than they were back then. They seem to be much more comfortable with living in the skins of the new compositions, and more willing to once again experiment and explore new sonic terrain and see where the songs might lead them, and are also digging back into their older material as well. This doesn't change our dismal outlook on the world, but it does provide a glowing, psychedelic alternate universe we can retreat to for a couple hours.
This set set isn't the breakthrough recording we need to hear right now, but it gives us a quantum of solace that the breakthrough might be coming some day, and in the Trump Era, that might be all that we can expect.
So, once again, thanks to the good people over at NYC Taper for recording and posting this, and to Animal Collective for allowing it to happen and for doing all that they're still doing.
Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730-1792) was a French violinist, composer, and writer on music theory and literature. His experience as both a writer and a musician gave him a unique viewpoint on the links between music and language and in developing a philosophy of music. As explained by Claude Levi-Strauss, Chabanon claimed that although the various forms of art engage each perceptional sense separately from the others, the mind uses the artistic experience of one sense to engage the others. At its highest level, art encourages and enables this cross-sensual perception.
Chabanon was apparently also interested in spiders and played the violin for them to see what kind of music they liked. He noted that "the spider, sitting at the center of its web, corresponds with all its threads, living, as it were, in each of them; and (if, like our senses, the threads were animate) the spider would be able to transmit to each of the threads the perception given to it by all the others."
A similar image, Indra's net, describes the interconnectedness of all phenomena. As explained by Timothy Brook, "When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists."
Setting aside for now the lyrics in songs, music consists of sounds but not words, and the sounds are not explicit representations of other things. A C-sharp note does not carry any significant meaning separate from, say, D-flat. Each sound is more or less empty and has neither its own meaning nor character. Musical sounds do not have a precise, agreed-upon vocabulary the way words and writing do, and thus cannot explicitly articulate an idea or describe a scene.
No other art works this way. To Chabanon, a poem, a painting, or a piece of sculpture were all more or less depictions of other things and conveyed some level of meaning. Chabanon lived before the age of impressionism and abstract art, so to him all painting functioned as photography does now.
Music does not faithfully reproduce the natural world the way photography or a natural sound recording does. Chabanon wondered why the charms of music did not require it to have to imitate our sense impressions in the way that poetry, painting, or sculpture were required to provide faithful images. "If music," he asked, "is not an imitation of nature, then what is it?"
To answer his question, he reasoned that the ear found its own innate pleasures, which could be enjoyed independently of the other senses. Music acts on a sensual level and specifically on the sense of hearing alone, but if it appears to have meaning for the listener, it must be because the mind becomes involved. Unlike words, sounds have no intrinsic meaning, but the mind "seeks to establish relations or analogies with different objects, and with various impressions produced by nature." The slightest analogies, the weakest relations are sufficient for the mind to find an corollary. In this way, the mind takes the spider-web thread of hearing to inform the threads of thought, memory, and the other senses.
Knowing that the mind creates analogies and corollaries, composers create multi-sensual impressions using elements of rhythm and tonal scale. For example, waves on the sea can be evoked not by trying to produce the sound of the ocean the way a tape recorder might but by melodies that rise and fall in roughly the same rhythm as swells in the ocean, and it's the mind of the listener that associates the rise and fall of the music, that slightest analogy and weakest relation, with the rise and fall of the sea. From there, it doesn't take much imagination to feel the sun on one's skin, smell an ocean breeze, and visualize surfers bobbing up and down on their boards waiting for the next set of waves. That formula has served Brian Wilson well.
Chabanon noted that a weak, continuous oscillation of two notes could render the murmuring of a brook; a cascade of rising or falling notes express a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, or a gust of wind; numerous basses playing in unison and rolling the melody evoke the sea; and so on. Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolfpresents a veritable catalogue of these effects, as does Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.
Musical impressions can go far beyond mere representations of nature. Music can capture emotional states ranging from joy to rage, from loneliness to ecstasy. Modern musicians convey the psychedelic experience by composing music with multiple layers that each function on their own and reward individual attention, so that the listener gets "lost" among the various levels and loses sense of time and forgets which level they're "supposed" to be listening. The Miles Davis Quintet understood this well and were masters at musically evoking the sensation of marijuana use:
Animal Collective understood this as well:
In the spider web of our consciousness, the thread of hearing informs the threads of feeling and sight and emotional/cognitive experience. The mind orchestrates our sensory experience and uses smell to interpret taste, sound to inform sight, and so on, and no sensation stands alone apart from all the rest of sensation, just like the pearls in Indra's net reflect every other pearl in the net. We're all synesthetic to some degree or another, and the pleasures of music come in part from what our minds do with the sounds presented to us.
Last Saturday night, Baltimore's Animal Collective played the Buckhead Theater. First, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith opened with some psychedelic ambient electronic music.
Apparently, Smith's formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as "one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been." Smith left the island to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice as her primary instrument, before switching to classical guitar and piano. However, after a neighbor lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer, she soon began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound.
It's logical that her sound would be appreciated by Animal Collective fans, and she didn't hurt her chances of being accepted by the audience when she opened her set with a synth line that sounded a lot like the opening of AnCo's My Girls.
Not that Animal Collective themselves bothered to play My Girls. They're touring behind their new Painting With LP and mostly played songs from that album. The only thing they played off of their wildly successful and popular 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion was the largely overlooked song Daily Routine, which is not even one of the stand-out songs from that recording.
Animal Collective are touring as a trio while Deakin is sitting this one out after his terrific Sleep Cycle EP. In addition to Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist, the band is touring with guest drummer Jeremy Hyman of Ponytail and Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks. Saturday night, the band opened their set with Painting With's Natural Selection, followed by a cover of Martha Reeve & The Vandella's Jimmy Mack (of all things). They followed that with a couple more songs from Painting With (On Delay and Lying In The Grass), and before they lost the audience with the largely unfamiliar new material, launched into the eminently danceable single, FloriDada, from that same LP. Painting With's Vertical followed FloriDada before the first "classic" AnCo song of the night, the aforementioned Daily Routine.
It's not just the veridical pleasure of hearing the familiar sounds that made Daily Routine such a welcome addition to the set - the new songs are by and large so much less compositionally complex and texturally interesting than older AnCo material that it often sounds like a waste of the musician's talents to spend so much time with them. So after the band returned to Painting With with Summing The Wrench following Daily Routine, it was a real pleasure to enjoy an extended version of Loch Raven from 2005's Feels, followed by Alvin Row from 2000's Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, a song they haven't performed live before this tour.
That was pretty much the way the evening went: the new material did sound better live than the recorded versions, but the audience largely waited through the new stuff until the band offered another gem from their impressive back catalog. Disappointingly, the set ended with another Painting With song, The Burglars.
Before it sounds like I'm too disenchanted with the new material, I'll point out that I did appreciate the clever vocal interplay between Avey and Panda on many of the songs, sometimes alternating syllables in different keys on the same chorus, almost like the hocketing technique employed by Dirty Projectors. So that was cool. The new songs were fun and entertaining while they lasted, but like eating candy, once over, there was nothing left to digest. And as always with an Animal Collective show, both the stage setting, the lighting, and the projections were interesting and innovative.
As you can imagine, I was not disappointed when AnCo returned to Feels to start their encore with a long version of Bees.
One thing I really love about Animal Collective is that when they play a song, they really commit to it. There's no raised-eyebrow irony from anybody in the band when they play, and everybody seems to throw their whole selves into each song, rolling their heads, closing their eyes, and seemingly letting the music they're creating transport them away to some other dimension. Bees is a relatively slow song, especially for one of that length, but everyone on stage seemed to be completely in the moment of that song for it's entire duration, implicitly inviting the audience to join them on their journey.
Painting With's Recycling followed Bees, and the night ended with Golden Gals, another upbeat if forgettable single from Painting With. Painting With is not going to be remembered as one of Animal Collective's seminal works, and while it's understandable that the band is concentrating on their new material on this tour, both to promote album sales and also to explore ways of breathing new life into the songs for later years, it's worth noting that the show didn't include any songs from their last studio LP, 2012's Centipede Hz, another of their lesser efforts. However, the set didn't include any of their most popular songs, like My Girls, Peacebone, and Brothersport, either, or anything else from Merriweather Post Pavillion other than Daily Routine, or anything from Strawberry Jam or from their classic Sung Tongs LP.
Perhaps the best Animal Collective show I've been to was at The Tabernacle during a tour between LPs, after the Centipede Hz tour but before recording had started on Painting With. They chose freely from all of their albums and played the songs they and the audience enjoyed. Now, supporting the disappointing Painting With, they're playing the songs the audience endures in order to get to the "good stuff."
You could say that's an artist's prerogative, but you could also say it's self-indulgent. Or out-of-touch.
This is a particularly streamlined edition of TWS. I could say it's because we all need to rest up for next week's Shaky Knees festival, but the truth is that I'm suffering some sort of internet connectivity problem that I can't quite figure out. I can access some sites, like this, quite readily, but I can't get to other URLs, like every venue's website, despite multiple reboots, unplugging and re-plugging of modems, and all manner of other attempted fixes, and had to research most of this post using my iPhone. But, still, there's some good shows this week that still deserve mention despite my problems (it's not about me), culminating in Saturday night's sold-out Animal Collective show at Buckhead Theater.
As always, please keep in mind that musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives and I'm prone to errors, mistakes, typos, and fubars; it's advisable to confirm any of the information below on your own before making plans.
MONDAY, MAY 2
Lupe Fiasco (Terminal West)
Lupe Fiasco is an acclaimed and uncompromising Chicago rapper whose lyrics take on countless political and social issues.
Megadeath (The Tabernacle)
Led by Dave Mustaine, Megadeath are one of the most popular and important thrash metal bands, with music that contains strong social and political messages.
TUESDAY, MAY 3
Woods (Purgatory at The Masquerade)
The underground psychedelic folk-rockers alternate between pastoral songcraft and otherworldly strangeness.
Chelsea Wolfe (Heaven at The Masquerade)
A darkly distinctive singer/songwriter with nods to electronic, folk, and metal, Wolfe has attaracted an almost cult-like following.
Chelsea Wolfe at The Earl, January 30, 2013
Bullet For My Valentine (The Tabernacle)
Welsh metal band who built up a large fan base by blending muscular riffs and emo harmonies.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 4
Wild Belle (The Earl)
Chicago-based brother-and-sister duo make folk, dance, and psychedelic-tinged indie pop.
Wild Belle at Shaky Knees, 2014
Kamasi Washington (Variety Playhouse)
On paper, I should really like this saxophonist who has drawn comparisons to Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, and whose connections include Gerald Wilson and Raphael Saadiq, but somehow he just hasn't clicked yet with me. But it's not about me. A crucial part of L.A.'s progressive jazz scene, Washington released the expansive LP The Epic in 2015.
Citizen Cope (Center Stage)
Cope creates a soulful blend of folk-R&B with laid-back reggaefied beats and the occasional hip-hop flourish.
Queensrÿche (Heaven at The Masquerade)
This Seattle quintet constructed a progressive form of heavy metal drawing equally from guitar pyrotechnics and art rock.
Mother's Finest (Eddie's Attic)
Two sold-out shows in one night by popular Georgia funk rock band Mother's Finest.
THURSDAY, MAY 5
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (The Earl)
Freaked-out psychedelic madness by way of Melbourne, Australia.
Larkin Poe (Terminal West)
Southern roots rockers who formed after the Lovell Sisters called it a day in 2009.
FRIDAY, MAY 6
The Deslondes (The Earl)
Loose but lively country-influenced band featuring five musicians who found their groove in New Orleans.
La Luz (Aisle 5)
La Luz are a Seattle-based quartet that mixes up doo wop, surf music, girl group sounds, and indie rock into one smart package.
La Luz at Bumbershoot, 2014
Liz Vice (Eddie's Attic)
Elizabeth Lorraine "Liz" Vice is a gospel music recording artist and musician from Portland, whose music career started in 2015 with the studio album, There's a Light.
Bring Me The Horizon (The Tabernacle)
Popular U.K. metalcore band.
Disturbed, Rob Zombie (Aaron's Amphitheater)
Disturbed are a multi-platinum nü metal band from Chicago, bolstered by their songs' melodic complexity and by swaggering frontman David Draiman. Rob Zombie was the lead vocalist of hard rockers White Zombie who went on to a solo career that blends gore-inspired lyrics with heavy, abrasive rock.
Freddie Gibbs (Hell at The Masquerade)
Influenced by 2Pac, Biggie, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, this Midwest rapper came up through the world of Internet downloads and mixtapes.
SATURDAY, MAY 7
Animal Collective (Buckhead Theater)
Their best LPs are apparently now behind them, but this innovative and acclaimed indie band with a penchant for experimental electronics, childlike campfire folk, and a warped take on Beach Boys harmonies can still be counted on for a wild and interesting live show.
Animal Collective at tHe Tabernacle, October 2012
Old 97s, Heartless Bastards (Terminal West)
Led by Rhett Miller, Old 97s are a second-wave alt-country band from Dallas that mixes twang-filled rock and power pop. Heartless Bastards are a smart, scrappy, and muscular roots rock band led by Erika Wennerstrom that fuses blues, hard rock, punk, and country.
Old 97s (with Nikki Lane), Shaky Knees 2015
Heartless Bastards at Shaky Knees, 2015
Steep Canyon Rangers (Variety Playhouse)
This band of young souls plays old-time bluegrass music.
SUNDAY, MAY 8
Secret Sisters (Eddie's Attic)
Secret Sisters are a Muscle Shoals-based country-folk duo.
California Honeydrops (Park Tavern)
Formed in 2007 by playing in the subway stations of Oakland, California, The Honeydrops are a blues and R&B band whose sound is tied to their instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and NOLA style.
Deakin, arguably the least respected member of Animal Collective (he sat out on some of AC's most popular albums), has just released Sleep Cycle, probably the best Collective-related offering since 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, maybe even the best since Feels (2005).
Just Am contains so many different textures and passages, which all manage to flow together without sounding random or haphazard. There's some freak folk elements, some melodic Beach Boys harmonies, a rippling piano line, and washes of synthesizers, before the whole thing dissolves into a musique concrete noise collage, and it's not even the best song on the album (that would be opener Golden Chords, in my humble opinion).
Freakin' Deakin surprised everybody and just produced a masterpiece.
The rumors are true - Animal Collective are playing Alvin Row during their current tour - a song from their very first album Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, released back in 2000 and that they've never performed live before.
Here's Loch Raven from Feels at the same show:
Animal Collective will perform at the Buckhead Theater on May 7.
Another new song from Painting With, which comes out this Friday. The new song, Golden Gal opens with a sample from an episode of The Golden Girls. Below is Lying In The Grass from the new album, which I somehow missed when it came out a couple weeks ago.
"Viewer discretion is advised - the video has been identified to potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy," or in other words, Animal Collective have released the video to accompany their new song Floridada.
