Alright, let me dispense with the biases first. I’ve been a devotee of this band since around the release of Here Comes the Indian in 2003- that’s not to thumb my nose and say I’ve been into them since Dave Portner and Noah Lennox were working at Other Music or whatever, but It’s been a little bit longer than last May’s release of the great, but inconclusive Sung Tongs. They are, hands down, my favorite band making music right now, despite the fact that they’ve yet to make a single flawless (or even near-flawless) record. This is a long way of going around to say: see this band live. The sold-out Bowery Ballroom show the other night was, I think, my 5th or so show, and it further convinced me that this band needs to be understood in a live context.
I get a little tired hearing about how this band is just a bunch of freaky-silly Beach Boys imitators- live, they’re chaotic, intense, messy, and dark. There’s a near caustic passion to their performance, a kind of exorcism. Songs grow out of swirls of ambient sounds and processed loops of Brian Weitz’s rig, Dave Portner’s voice feels painfully tugged out of his spirit like taffy, Conrad Deaken’s hands jitter across his Telecaster, coaxing constellations of distortions, and Noah Lennox anchors the group with the pounding precision of his abbreviated drumkit and electronic beats. This is a band obsessed with texture, manipulating their sound live, truly drawing equally from organic and electronic palettes, and the space of their intersection. At their heights, the music reaches rending frenzied ecstacies- “Kids On Holiday,” a druggy backpack travelsong from Sung Tongs gets transformed into waves of noisy catharsis, more a confused, angered dirge than a psychedelic ballad.
Perhaps I can best try to suggest the gravity I think Animal Collective holds by using a word so often used to describe the band: “child-like”- a word always used in hindsight, rendering it a term of sweet harmlesness. To truly consider childhood from the point of a child (which we all were and continue to be, in certain ways), it’s a little stranger. Childhood is confusing, difficult, mixed. “Kids On Holiday” might seem genial to us, but for the child wandering through the airport amidst his yelling parents, a smiling krishna, a retarded man and his mother, etc., it’s nearly terrifying. The Animal Collective are nostalgic, wistful, tender, sweet, and all those other neutered adjectives, but they’re more- seeing them live brings to the forefront their agression, rawness, strangeness, and beauty.