The Animal Collective Encyclopedia

With all apologies to the Stooges and "1969," it's now "2009 okay/ Across the USA/ Another year for me and you/ Another year with nothin' to do." But with the dawning of this new year comes renewed hope for our godforsaken country, our roughed-up economy, our tattered national reputation — and some new music, too. More reasons to be cheerful — and among them perhaps the first great album of the year, Merriweather Post Pavilion.

What Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox, David "Avey Tare" Portner and Brian "Geologist" Weitz seem to have in mind for this release is to build a breadcrumb trail back to the band's altered-consciousness smasheroo, 2007's Strawberry Jam — but adding a pop twist. All of their by-now signature moves — the sunshine-stained Brian Wilson vocal chorales; the Bowie-meets-Eno-in the backseat of Kraftwerk's car drone-rock of indeterminate origin; the Phil Spectoresque wall of noiseadelic reverb coating each track like a film of about-to-be-put-to-good-use bubble-blowing soap; the lingering feeling that Yes hasn't officially released a new album in nearly a decade so perhaps this is them, under an assumed name? — are recognizably in evidence, but they're assembled in catchier, newfangled ways. Just check the flanged fabulosity and burbling bonghit samples of Lennox's "Bluish" ("I'm getting lost in your curls, all drawing pictures on your skin/so it twirls"), the airy, windblown sonic vistas and "I don't care for fancy things" populism of "My Girls," their latest in a series of arrhythmic, psychedelic odes to the waking dream ("Also Frightened:" "Will it be just like they're dreaming? Puddles that breathe, covered by leaves") and even a hot-weather anthem dedicated to sweating the girls in their scanty summer best (the deliberately eccentric and Krautrocking "Summertime Clothes," which bears nothing in common with any other rock 'n roll anthem about this subject, but proudly holds its own alongside them, anyway) and tell me you don't hear a band growing before your very ears.

The album's eleven tracks form an interesting solid mass covering every conceivable corner of the pop universe, and end up feeling a bit like ten pounds worth of ideas stuffed carefully into a five-pound sack. Inherently this is a Very Good Thing (we should all suffer from the tyranny of too many ideas) but does rather neatly demonstrate the challenge Animal Collective faces in editing all their various brainstorms into a single/digestible whole. But on this release, it works; and wonderfully so.

Ultimately, what emerges from Animal Collective's lab this time out is sort of an '00s update on Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets: pure pop with all the radio frequencies ripped out, an album allowed to break free from the moorings of today's commercial vicissitudes and simply float in space on the merits of its melodies, musicality and moods. This statement isn't as pretentious a metaphor as it might initially read: back in the day, Pink Floyd was attempting a perilous career makeover, shifting from a band capable of rendering Syd Barrett's acid-flavored whims into three-minute bits of BBC-ready pop to a space-rock outfit capable of playing single chords/keys around a single thematic subject for what could sometimes amount to single sides of an entire album. What Animal Collective does here is basically start at Atom Heart Mother and go backward — the band has already perfected its "lost my shit in the blotter storm and can't get up" thing, so the only logical direction from here is to head back toward the light, where its Beach Boys fixation can make amends with its otherwise pronounced eccentricities. A perfect statement to kick off what promises to be perhaps the weirdest year we've seen in many a dark side of the moon.

Strawberry Jam assumes its place in a paradoxical trajectory that has found Animal Collective getting stranger as they tend toward the more conventional, and vice-versa. The group started focusing on songcraft on 2005’s breakthrough Feels, but the follow-up takes another step, with compositions that are more rigorous in at least presenting the illusion of conventional rock songs. (It’s certainly a world away from the smeary murmurs and abstract blasts of noise that mark Animal Collective's early catalog.) “Peacebone” rambunctiously sets the tone, with a pounding, primitive rhythm and manic vocals that warn against obsessions with the past and wander into choice bits of skewed wordplay (“I was a jugular vein in a juggler’s girl...I was supposedly leaking the most interesting colors”). The song also spins out something like a store of traditional musical riffs, though the more you listen, the less comprehensible the tools within start to sound — hence a mix of calypso, art rock and Godzilla growls that come together to sound like nothing with any real precedent. The rest of the album follows similar cues, with highlights including “Chores” (a song sung by Panda Bear that features a gorgeous bit of would-be church music near its end) and “Fireworks” (a live favorite that careens between demonic rock screams and melodic yelps from what sound like very joyous elves).

Comprised of Animal Collective's Panda Bear -- born Noah Lennox -- and Scott Mou (aka DJ Casio), Jane's nearly danceable concoctions on Berserker are entertaining to an extent. The title track opens the disc with a redundant, rhythmic approach that sacrifices melody -- save for Lennox's capable vocal line -- in favor of energy. At six minutes, the latter is the shortest track on an album that veers from the ambient, Radiohead-like noise of "Slipping Away" to the 25-minute closing drone known as "Swan," which sails in ultra-slow, über-soft mode. With merely four tracks that collectively approach an hour in length, Berserker has the ability to captivate the listener or drive those privy completely bonkers.

Excepter's own bemusing path through the murkier corners of whatever the noise scene of the early 21st century is has likely frustrated as many fans as it has entranced -- it's no surprise that they've ended up on Animal Collective's label, and Debt Dept shows why it's a good home for them. Beginning with the logically entitled "Entrance 08," an intentionally trudging number that actually keeps up the pace, Excepter are again showing that the conventional way to mix a song isn't the only one. Vocals here, as throughout the album, exist almost as addenda to the songs -- not just background textures but not anything else either, giving a sense of a series of dramatic recitations being heard from a few doors over, evocative but not quite understandable. The song itself is a perfect, lengthy statement of purpose with its up-front guitars and increasingly stripped-down and focused drones -- get in or get out, the band almost seems to be saying -- and from there Debt Dept explores a variety of takes on the basic sound. While comparisons could be made to various no wave forebears, an interesting analog -- suggested by songs like "Kill People," with its hollow drum sounds and general murk -- would be the experimental side of early Bauhaus, where such demi-instrumentals as "Untitled" and "Earwax" held sway. Meanwhile, "Greenhouse/Stretch" is an actual death disco number of sorts -- or at least a dance track for actual zombies, thanks to its core keyboard loop squelch -- while the concluding "Sunrise" (at least not counting the bonus track, "'Burgers") is an honest to God rock epic in the band's own way, thanks to the build of the verses and the way it feels more like an "actual" song as such, or more accurately a more conventional one.

Former roommates, Animal Collective's Avey Tare and Black Dice's Eric Copeland re-enact odd couple household dramas under the name Terrestrial Tones. Stinky socks, take-out containers left out overnight, pilfered corn flakes, spilled bong water, being out of toilet paper, overly loud music — such domestic details can be heard throughout Dead Drunk. But rather than be at odds, Tare and Copeland are sympathetic, gravitating toward the same tweaked-out sounds. The album is full of lived-in, open-ended, Cluster-like jams, comprised of looped piano, industrial white noise, alien communications (Tare's voice is at its most warped, rambling and inscrutable), powered by beats that replicate that telltale thump of headboards against walls.

Animal Collective — four couch-surfing, scraggly dudes from the Northeast — write rounds disguised as songs, time-delayed melodies that swallow themselves whole before completion and search for a finite end that never arrives. Sometimes the effect is like Columbus addressing the Flat Earth Society, but on Feels, the band's new album, it's like waking up to zero gravity, the whole world weightless and untethered — and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than chilling on the ceiling?

Feels is easily the most accessible Animal Collective record yet, and also one of the best 2005 releases, period. "Did You See the Words" and "The Purple Bottle" tug from the same bottle of delirium as the Arcade Fire — it's as if everyone's in a race to see who can finish the song first. "Purple Bottle" in particular really impresses, the drumming primal but dampened, the vocals yelping and pygmy-like and an incredible "chorus" of soft yawps and falsetto sighs. "Bees" takes off on Panda Bear's excellent Young Prayer record, all harpsichord and enchanting forests. Bjork fans in particular might be surprised by how much they dig this one.

But far and beyond all of these excellent moments is "Banshee Beat." It's an absolute epiphany: chanted vocals, the strongest melody on the record, a pensive guitar drone, four chords, bombastic drums, percussion that sounds like spoon-thwacking, a too-brief crescendo rain-delayed for six minutes that still satisfies, a song that begs for the loudest stereo system ever. If this doesn't send you for the "download all" button, then nothing will.

Water Curses is comprised of four songs that were recorded during the sessions for Animal Collective’s 2007 hallmark Strawberry Jam — though there’s enough difference between the EP and the album to make it count as considerably more than just a dump of outtakes. Taken as a whole, Water Curses ranks as Animal Collective’s poppiest gesture yet, with a newly apparent sense of song structure and simple hummability burrowing deep into that part of the brain where earwigs go. The opening title track finds Avey Tare flitting through melodies in dense lyrical lines that rise and fall over a carnival mix of polka drum taps and glimmers of what may or may not be real steel drums. “Street Flash” follows in a more meditative mode, with a slowed rush of sounds and a brilliantly grafted sample of a scream (or a cry or a laugh — it’s hard to tell, exactly) acting as the hook. “Cobwebs” is slower still, and prettier, with a pointed lyrical refrain “We’re not going underground.” The outgoing “Seal Eyeing” plays like a contemplative hymn, all but ambient in terms of energy and irrepressible in terms of tune.

Left for dead after experiencing both a whiplash ascent with the cognoscenti and the resultant backlash while associated with the DFA label, Load Blown finds the Brooklyn trio retreating deep inside their skulls, practice spaces and belly buttons, reinventing themselves as mischievous sound-collagists without equal. Drawing on everything from crackly calypso to daytime television commercials to no-fi thrash, Black Dice dish out dense miniatures in 4 to 7-minute blasts, rather than the extended lengths of yore. While peers like Wolf Eyes take their compositions to the furthest thresholds of noise, Black Dice instead sculpt pieces — like "Kokomo," "Drool" and "Manoman" — into playful, noisome, highly rhythmic affairs, creating an alternate universe for the tag "dance-punk."

Eric Copeland has a variety of outlets for his muse: a trio with Black Dice, a duo with Animal Collective's Avey Tare (Terrestrial Tones), as well as his own solo project. But it speaks volumes of his ear, headspace and funny bone that, while doing something not wholly dissimilar with his other bands, he manages to come up with something distinctly in his own voice on this debut. World music friendly, Copeland takes the rattles and chants of "La Booly Boo" and gently imagines them as some ritualistic field recording from a distant planet, while the title track and "Tree Aliens" mesmerize (and unsettle) with their circular and peculiar logic.

If someone asks what electronica is, the best response is "many different things." Electronica can be anything from the harsh, abrasive sensory assault of techno played at maximum volume in a rave or club setting to the lush, sensuous sounds of chillout and downtempo. Depending on the artist, electronica might choose to gently wine and dine the listener or -- on the other hand -- may take great pleasure in beating, punching, stomping and pounding the listener into submission (techno has a long history of doing a lot of beating, punching, stomping and pounding). In the case of the New York City-based Growing, electronica has often been described as a drone -- and the word "drone" frequently applies on All the Way. But even though this 2007/2008 recording can be quite repetitious, there is still a fair amount of variety. Parts of the instrumental 36-minute disc are mildly abrasive (although not ultra-abrasive), but much of the time, All the Way is more dreamy than anything. The fact that instrumentals like "Wrong Ride," "Green Flag," "Reconstruction," and "Lens Around" tend to be repetitious is not a bad thing, and anyone who finds Growing's use of repetition to be problematic is missing the point. Growing often go for musical hypnosis; therefore, repetition is not only advisable for them -- it is downright necessary. It is an effective tool in their high-tech arsenal. All the Way isn't Growing's best or most essential release, but it's a likable outing and should have no problem appealing to the New Yorkers' hardcore followers.

Fronted by Brooklyn's Avey Tare and Panda Bear, Animal Collective meld weird forest sounds (check both real and man-made meows), twittering percussion and jangly acoustic strums into a chirping, trippy slab of post-'60s counterculture, unlike most anything you've ever heard. From opener "Leaf House," sounds of varying origin dart in from every direction, and Sung Tongs quickly becomes all-encompassing, seeping into every pore of your body. Avey Tare and Panda Bear sing the way we all do when no one else is around, vocal chords free and haphazard, flapping happily, in a way that's oddly liberating.

On first listen, Prospect Hummer, the welcome four-song collaboration of obscure folk doyenne Vashti Bunyan with postmodern experimentalists Animal Collective, appears to be a formless wash of vocals and autoharp, a work that ebbs and flows with some power but ultimately signifies nothing. It gradually becomes clear, however, that something more is occurring here; the group is channeling the same sense of primal folk -- not traditional, yet very ancient -- that Bunyan and her friends did on the quiet 1970 masterpiece Just Another Diamond Day and Animal Collective did on a different scale with 2004's Sung Tongs. This is very much a modern recording, focusing on the spirit of the performance rather than song-based material (the only exception is the closer). While the material doesn't have the same infectious power as Bunyan's "Rose Hip November," it deliciously blends the similarities held by both Bunyan in the late '60s and Animal Collective nearly 40 years later.

Person Pitch may not sound like a singles album, but that’s exactly what it is. Culled from 12-inches and compilation appearances, the songs on the album don’t reflect the product of an intense period of recording; instead, the album is a general expression of what Noah Lennox has been up to in the years since his second album, 2004's Young Prayer (i.e., getting married, having a child, moving to Portugal). In other words, Lennox has been busy getting happy.

You can tell simply from the song titles — “Comfy in Nautica,” “Bros,” “Search for Delicious” — but the songs themselves confirm it: “Comfy” opens the shutters on the album by slowly revealing a storefront of chanting and hand-clapping backup singers behind Lennox’s slow-motion singalong. “Take Pills” ups the tempo, gradually building its way from a waltzing lullaby into a looped verse from a forgotten Avalon/Funicello beach movie.

But the two sunny movements of "Take Pills" are trumped by “Good Girl/Carrots,” which finds time for organic trance, a nursery rhyme-esque middle and a narcotic dub coda. The undisputed highlight, though, is the twelve-minute “Bros,” which sounds built expressly for Julee Cruise, until Lennox rubs his eyes and the song goes widescreen. Judging by these results, we could stand to hear Lennox happy more often.

The trio of keyboardist Kate Rosko, guitarist Nina Mehta and drummer Abby Portner (who, as Avey Tare's sister, is an actual part of the Animal Collective family tree) can't help but evoke the naif ruminations of hallowed all-female post-punk group the Raincoats. And the group, having changed their name from First Nation to Rings, willfully invoke the percussion rounds and campfire incant of those legends — not to mention disproving the notion that noise-making is an exclusive boys club. But Rings are quick to expose their feelings on their second album, Black Habit. "Is He Handsome" displays emotion openly, while "Teepee" manages to somehow be both twee and tribal. Each song lasts just long enough to allow bits of piano and rattled-and-sung lyrics to spiral in space.

Múm's first album for Fat Cat -- by no coincidence, the label that also broke fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós -- has all the majestic synths, crackly drum machine percussion, sampled silence, and crystalline vocals you'd expect from the country that produced Björk and Sigur Rós, though with less focus on digital sound than the former and less reliance on drama than the latter. Múm is very interested in the music of sound, but Finally We Are No One never sounds like a difficult record; if it's not the instruments sounding naïve or folksy (in good ways), the lisping, childlike vocals are bound to prompt adjectives like adorable and precious. "Green Grass of Tunnel" has the sweet melancholia, coloring-book hip-hop, and slowly shifting chords of poptronica producers like isan or Boards of Canada, and also trades on the wide-eyed fairy-tale qualities of Björk. Apart from the hefty title, "Don't Be Afraid, You Have Just Got Your Eyes Closed" approaches mainstream appeal -- briefly, and at several different times -- with a nice dance beat gradually replaced by a beatbox breakdown, toy xylophone, and a nice trumpet melody. Several individual passages of songs strike an evocative chord, like the string quartet, piano, warm synthesizers, and percussion rumblings of "K/Half Noise" combining to recall the quieter portions of Tortoise's landmark "Djed."

Responsible for one of the most critically-feted, argued about, scrutinized and seismic album of 2009 — Merriweather Post Pavilion — Animal Collective are not ones to remain still for long, even when they are perched at the top. They toured unceasingly and yet somehow found time to release a massive three LP box set of archival material, complete an experimental film and soundtrack (for release next year), and sneak back into the studio for a new EP.

AC fans expecting odds and ends from MPP and its booming, shimmering, bright pop will be both tricked and treated with Fall Be Kind. For one, there's the much-discussed, first legally licensed Grateful Dead sample powering "What Would I Want? Sky," a shuffling, gently loping, woozy number unlike anything in the band's oeuvre. From there, the band spins out in new directions. There's the weightless acapella number "Bleed" that casts their sublime harmonies in a new (outer) space while "I Think I Can" grows dense with vocal fireworks. The band also puts to tape a live staple, "From a Highway," a slow crest of a song that takes its time reaching its destination, regardless that it's the middle of nowhere.

A strange band whose music defies description while inspiring a store of associations, Animal Collective meander through folk, noise and electronic frippery with an eye cocked forever toward the mystical. It's an approach best observed live in lofts and clubs throughout downtown Manhattan and the leading edge of Brooklyn, but Here Comes the Indian offers a suitably cracked and fogged-up window into Animal Collective's fabulist world. Capturing the group in plugged-in mode, songs like "Native Belle" take sprawling journeys through what sound like shamanic rituals, replete with murky chanting, dream-world electronics, and occasional fits of rock situated to break the spell. "Hey Light" revolves around patches of screaming and barking, lacing hot Krautrock guitars through a tightly wound song that unwinds with a sing-along handclap outro. "Panic" sounds almost ancient with its processed dessert moans, while "Slippi" suggests a would-be pop song from a planet different than our own. Reactions to the messy sonics are sure to differ, but it's hard to deny that Animal Collective sound like pretty much nobody else.

The album that started it all. Originally credited to its two songwriting principles, Avey Tare and Panda Bear (though Tare wrote all the songs and Bear is relegated to the drums), Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, is shockingly assured and mature, childlike and wide-eyed, dense and multi-layered. The songwriting is expansive and surrealistic, earning apt comparisons to everyone from Pink Floyd to Incredible String Band. Winsome, tricky, yet also nightmarish and on-edge, tucked inside of songs like "Chocolate Girl," "April and the Phantom," and "Penny Dreadfuls" are the sonic seeds of the group's future efforts. The keening vocal melodies and hypnotic rhythms that inform all subsequent dialogues between Tare and Bear are here, in a remarkably fresh-faced form that they never quite managed elsewhere in their long discography.

Follow-up Danse Manatee, made with Brian "The Geologist" Wertz, is a more rhythmic and improvised affair, for better or for worse. Accused upon release of being childish and obtuse, it's easy now to see how the band was working on honing its ritualistic, drum-based foundation, shelving the explicit songcraft of Spirit. Whether it's brief but resplendent shards like "Essplode" or the more expansive and body-dissolving epics like "Ahhh, Good Country" (which continue to be echoed in everything from Sung Tongs' "Visiting Friends" to Strawberry Jam's "For Rev. Green") Danse Manatee provides a prickly but crucial piece of the Animal Collective puzzle.

Recorded at live shows before it was clear whether Animal Collective played merely songs or improvised parts of desiccated symphonies, Hollinndagain sounds deeply ritualistic and ripe for haunted ceremonies in dark rooms. It was released on limited-edition vinyl after their 2001 album Danse Manatee (itself no easy find at the time), and the reissue on CD works now to build bridges over vast stylistic fissures heard in the Animal Collective catalogue proper. The key is that it’s live — an incarnation in which the group’s sense of wonder is free to wander over time, which stretches and bends through spells of mellow moaning and buzzing builds of noise (hear both in “Pride And Fight”). The mix of careening madness and barely-there drone laced through “Forest Gospel” captures the Animal Collective of 2001 in a telling mode: chaotic, anxious, poisoned, poised — and ready to blow at any given moment.

While the Animal Collective discography and Paw Tracks label is peppered with pet projects from friends, relatives and the like, it oft-times documents encounters with fellow music-makers. Take the case of Mississippian minstrel Dent May, encountered while the band was recording Merriweather Post Pavilion at producer Ben Allen's Sweet Tea studio in Alabama. Smitten, his debut, appeared soon after. Fans of Morrisey, Ben Folds and Elvis Costello — albeit slurring, tiki bar versions of them — take note: Dent May — and, of course, his magnificent Ukulele — croons and careens through these decidedly slanted slices of Tin Pan Alley songcraft, often calling to mind another beguiling uke plucker: Tiny Tim.

A four-track prankster down'n'out in the Hollywood Hills, Ariel Pink encountered Animal Collective during their west coast tour, handing them a homemade CDR and inviting them into his own little world of music-making -- a venture that had expanded to include nearly a dozen lo-fi skewed-pop masterworks. Sticky, psychotic, addictively catchy, rambling, bleary-eyed and clearly off his rocker, Ariel Pink continues not only the tradition of home-taping weirdos like R. Stevie Moore and Jandek, but also megalomaniacs as diverse as Todd Rundgren, Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa and — oh hell — Charlie Manson.

House Arrest, propelled by Pink's skewed take on human-beatboxing, is a slightly more pop affair, comparing various coastal disasters (and dropping hilarious asides about girls "putting out like girl scouts") on "West Coast Calamities" and getting downright funky on the NORML-approved "Getting' High in the Morning."

And they say art doesn’t have the power to change people: David Portner (Avey Tare) and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (Kría Brekkan) went to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire and were so moved that they decided to turn in the tapes for their new record, Pullhair Rubeye, backwards. For those familiar with the duo’s current (Animal Collective) and former (Múm) day jobs, this sort of experiment shouldn’t come as surprise. “who wellses in my hoff,” with its orchestra of spinning plates and otherworldly harmonizing, sounds almost par for the course for either band normally. As the songs were mostly recorded with guitars and voices, Pullhair begins to sound slightly same-y by album’s end, but that should be no problem for intrepid listeners: just throw these files in your favorite sound editor, turn them around, and you’ve got yourself another record entirely.