Animal Collective, London Kentish Town Forum

Animal Collective

March 24th, 2009

Animal Collective initially came to widespread attention with their 2004 album Sung Tongs, a record of acoustic strums, primitive drums, and yelps, screams and melodies that saw them lumped in with the freak-folk movement (that wasn’t really a movement at all) alongside Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart. Since then, the band have not so much progressed but leap-frogged over genres, creating an otherworldly ambience with 2005′s Feels, fidgety, electronic pop on 2007′s Strawberry Jam and, most recently, expansive, technicolour rave-songs on this year’s Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Each release has seen the band pick up a larger and larger number of devoted fans, culminating in Merriweather Post Pavilion actually charting in the top 30 of the UK album chart and lead single ‘My Girls’ receiving plays on national radio. For a band that has been active for ten years and has only been gradually tempering their tendencies towards noise and experimentation with pop hooks fairly recently, this newfound (relatively) popular success is akin to Sonic Youth sneaking onto MTV in the early ’90s.

However, Animal Collective don’t owe their success to a change in fashion or the sudden breakthrough of a new genre; they are band that owe their popularity to the Internet - to blogs, influential websites and, whisper it, file-sharing. It is inconceivable that this band could have reached such an audience at any other time in the last fifty years. They are a beacon of hope to bedroom-based, laptop musicians everywhere; success can come, it would seem, on your own terms, or at least on those of an anonymous, democratic Internet contingent, rather than through the more narrow, insular realms of the press or the restrictive controls of a record company.

And so, attending an Animal Collective show can sometimes feel like accidentally walking in on the meeting of an enormous cult; a lot of people really, really love this band and aren’t afraid to show it. Personally, I think some of their songs are brilliant - forward-thinking, odd, melodic, free of the usual self-consciousness that comes with a lot of recent music – though I am still yet to find an album of theirs that engages me the whole way through. And this is coming from a Sonic Youth fan.

Animal Collective’s live show has similar ups and downs. Their songs, anchored by the electronics of Geologist (whose head torch is the one constant, bobbing up and down to the music throughout), morph and merge from one to the next. The result is moments of joyful recognition, where a familiar hook breaks the surface, coupled with slightly less joyful periods of waiting for the songs to emerge from improvised breaks. ‘My Girls’, Strawberry Jam’s standout Fireworks’ and the ecstatically received ‘Brothersport’ provide the best moments, underlining why this band are so adored. The latter, with its Brazilian drum samples and screams, threatened to lift off completely, toeing a line between pop song, carnival and rave. Merriweather Post Pavilion track ‘Daily Routine’ was an unexpected highlight, its extended outro and Panda Bear’s reverbed vocals showed that sometimes the band are right to stretch out their songs and experiment in a live setting.

Older songs were reworked to fit in with the more electronics-based recent material; Sung Tongs’ ‘Leaf House’ closed the encore and ‘Slippi’, a track from 2003′s Here Comes The Indian, worked really well in its new guise. The bass was heavy, the beats high in the mix, to the point where the vocals were occasionally overshadowed; the emphasis was very much on translating material, which on record requires a bit of careful listening, in a more direct way. Animal Collective were aiming for both the feet and the head, and largely succeeded.

The visuals were also outstanding; the stage featured a large image of Merriweather Post Pavilion’s headache-inducing album cover and was dominated by a large white balloon, on which images were projected all night. Other than that, the band let the music do the talking, to the point where there was little interaction with the audience except for halfway through, when, at the only pause in the music all night, sort-of-frontman Avey Tare chucked a chocolate bunny into the audience.

So, drawing heavily on material from Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective delivered on the excessive hype they’ve received recently. They’re still halfway between an art band and a pop band, which can be frustrating at times, though it mostly leaves you with a warm feeling that if a band like this can continue to experiment and connect with such a large amount of people, maybe the music industry isn’t in such a bad state after all.

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