Animal Collective - Feels

Genre rock Publisher Fat Cat External Links Official Website Official Website

Animal Collective's disc sleeves (and its members' stage costumes, too, come to think of it) always manage to make the innocent and the sinister two sides of the same psychoactive coin, from Sung Tongs' grinning, zombie skeletons to Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished/Danse Macabre's overlapping line drawings of monsters, musicians, and other things in varying colors set against a black-brown backdrop to Feels' imitation-vintage Dick 'n Jane illustrations stained with what one hopes is spilled blackberry juice but could just as easily be fresh blood. The group's music is similarly portmanteau -- cutesy yet sorta creepy, sweet yet kinda scary.

This dynamic remains intact for Feels, as sometime playmates Daekin and the Geologist join Avey Tare and Panda Bear to distill yet more primo bathtub LSDisney: rambunctious scamperings, hallucination-thick hibernations, and blends of both. While early Collective concoctions leavened the group's innate, intimately twee bent with in-the-wild grown experimentation, Tongs -- the first AC recording to be widely available and heavily reviewed outside of niche journals like The Wire -- pushed their pop instincts to the fore, a demented beardo study in acoustic guitars, tape-abusing mischievousness, field/found sound fold-ins, harmonies galore, and more percussive elements than you could shake a still-attached rabbit's foot at. More ambitious, majestic, and deliberate, Feels grasps the pop ring tighter, strictly (and strategically) minimizing tape manipulations and easing in electric guitars, pianos, violins, a full drum kit to court, well, anybody with ears that work.

A joyous rainbow-romp of entwined ivory and axe, single "Grass" boasts the year's most expressive non-verbal chorus: Tare ooo-oooooing like a giddy owl while the others caw in rhythmic bursts, like trees full of surprised birds exploding in rapid succession. Heaven-sent autoharps chime while ghostly, wordless vocals swell, hover, and fade in and out in the background of "Bees" like friendly, wise, sentient winds, the odd manna drizzle or drip of piano or futzed-with animal cries loosed from the tidal mix now and again. On "Daffy Duck," Tare's syrup-sticky, Lost Boy half-whisperings defy comprehension, (the ones that can be understood, anyway) - "What I need is good advice/Cooked on plates of brownies," "My hand can make you warm again," "If I had volcano boots/for slipping in volcanoes..." Huh? - but complement their hushed, fantasy-limned surroundings: so-still-lake-rippled guitar crab-walking that sounds as though it barely escaped the demonic apple press crunch of Black Dice's Broken Ear Record steeped in just-this-side-of-haphazard piano stroking and gratuitous sub-dermal aural detritus.