The Long Cut is a column taking the scenic route through essential music. This column is an outgrowth of Hayden Childs’s ongoing project to listen to and review everything in his extensive music library, which can be found at his blog From Here To Obscurity. The explosion of digitized music in the last decade has led to unprecedented access to albums formerly out-of-print, hopelessly obscure, or simply less immediate needs. With this project, Childs means to slow down his musical consumption and enjoy the ride a little more.
I love a good hiatus, but we liberal rock critic types must keep vigilant. There’s terror centers to build at our nation’s monuments, death panels to oversee, exploding oil rigs to ignore, and most importantly, the trenchant cultural criticism of Fox News to mock. Guess which one convinced me to put my hiatus on hiatus.
Give up? It was this work of genius. It’s so brilliant that the people who gave us Fox & Friends had to publish it, too! In this amazingly well-thought-out piece (which is, I must note, not at all 40 years past its sell-by date, so get that out of your mind now), Mr. Crowder argues that hipsters are a monolithic force of snobbish liberalism, just like those damn beatniks and hippies who keep voting for Gene McCarthy and smoking drugs in our nation’s park systems and supermarkets. Mr. Crowder’s extensive knowledge of hipsters and hipster culture does not preclude him from having a mild case of gender confusion, and when referring to some of these no good youngster, he drops a “he… I mean she… Sorry, IT” line. Hilarious! Henny Youngman used to kill with that one in the Catskills, but hey, Mr. Crowder is a groovy, happening young person for whom the classics never get old, do you grok, 23 skidoo? The icing on the cake is the assertion by Mr. Crowder, whom Fox News helpfully identifies as a comedian, that these hipsters, this scourge of trust-fund liberalism, are so blind to the threat of terrorism that they are – here, I’ll quote it – “likely under the impression that Usama Bin Laden is wearing skinny jeans in his cave, currently listening to Animal Collective as he throws back cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Ha ha ha! Hipsters are so dumb. Also they stink, says Mr. Crowder’s punchline.
Now I can’t take this stuff personally. For one thing, I’m old and fat and look terrible in skinny jeans. Another, I’m relatively poor and have never lived in New York. (Sidebar: although Mr. Crowder appears to be a young New Yorker himself, he is apparently unaware that “hipster” is a common pejorative among hipsters.) All of this is to say that I am light years from hip, hep, or downtown by anyone’s metric. But as a liberal and a fan of Animal Collective, I feel – somewhat stupidly, I should add – that I must end my long, sleepy, pleasant hiatus to talk about the band and make the simple point that Mr. Crowder’s article appears in the same week that one character on Mad Men tells another that he is confusing a lot of things at once right now. What do these two things have in common? The answer may surprise you!
But unfortunately, Mr. Crowder’s article is low on content, leaving me little to do other than mock it, and I’ve already done that, so thanks for dropping by. It is troubling, although unsurprising, that many of the favorable commenters at Fox News seem to think that Crowder’s article is satire. This is because they do not understand the meaning of the word. Many a right-wing funnyperson (I’m too politically correct to say “not-so-funny retard”) shares this fundamental misunderstanding of what satire is. Let’s start with what it is not. Satire is not merely saying what you think while being sarcastic or exaggerating facts about the object of your scorn (i.e. “hipsters are dumb and overeducated and smelly and lazily rich in a way that I don’t support and I can’t tell the dudesters from the ladysters so to my mind they’re all Al-Qaeda loving fags”). In fact, there just isn’t a different word for that. When you use sarcasm in your funny funny talk, it’s not “satire” but “sarcasm,” and while it’s certainly fun to engage in (see the first five paragraphs of this very column), it’s isn’t particularly revelatory. Satire uses irony – which is a slippery concept for people with rigid minds, to be sure, which may be why the Fox News crowd can’t seem to grasp it – to make a critical point about its target. So that Fox article may be dripping with sarcasm, but it doesn’t include an ironic thrust and completely fails the irony smell test. If, for example, Mr. Crowder had written the article in the voice of a young hipster who was so besotted by Noam Chomsky that he believed Crowder’s absurd point about bin Laden and Animal Collective, then, see, that would be satire because it would contain an ironic criticism with a constructive point. But if Crowder had written the article that way, it’s quite possible that Fox News readers would fail to understand that joke, and then some rich financiers would fund a nationwide series of grassroots protests against hipsters, and then Sarah Palin would be on my tv saying something like “I’m not saying that Obama is a Muslim, but all us good non-Muslim Americans agree that the US Department of Public Standards must refudiate young people in skinny jeans from attackin’ the America I love,” so it’s really best for everyone when Fox News doesn’t try to engage in satire. Like the semicolon, satire is for advanced users only.
Blah blah blah. Let’s cast all of that aside and talk about those cuddly Muslim-friendly terrorists in Animal Collective.
The band fascinates me. Their sound is based on loops and electronic noise, but even while they’re sometimes abrasive, they’re also quite poppy and have many elements taken from classic rock. They sing like werewolf Beach Boys. They like to mess with their listeners’ minds like – god help us – the Grateful Dead. And they have the enthusiastic pop hooks of, well, anyone raised on punk rock. But they have a high experimental-to-accessible ratio that sometimes tips one way or the other with surprising results, somewhat like Four Tet or Can. Also interesting: they released four albums before settling on the name Animal Collective, but then retroactively assumed the prior albums into the band’s discography.
Spirit They’re Gone Spirit They’ve Vanished (2000). This album is credited to Avey Tare and Panda Bear, which are the noms-de-synth of the two primary voices of Animal Collective, respectively David Porter and Noah Lennox. It was originally intended as a solo album for Porter, but he was so impressed with Lennox’s drumming (which is, indeed, impressive throughout) that he changed the credit and thus opened the door on the band. The fundamental elements of Animal Collective are here at the outset: avant-garde compositional works synthesized with strange and dark folk songs and tempered with an unabashed love of pure pop for fractured people. The album is surprisingly cohesive with their future discography, considering it was a solo work with only two parts of the band.
Danse Manatee (2001). This album is credited to Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist (Brian Weitz), who became the main loop-master for the band. It’s more offputting than Spirit etc. with weirder effects and skronkier loops and hooks buried much further than before under blank noise. Easily the most difficult of Animal Collective’s studio albums, but Wikipedia helpfully notes that it is Geologist’s favorite of their works.
I
Hollinndagain (2002). This is a somewhat unfocused early live album also credited to Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist. I’ve been listening to quite a bit of Miles Davis’s work from the 70s lately, and while it’s tough to pin down why long improvisational jamming sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, it certainly seems that it’s more successful when everyone has the big picture in mind. This album doesn’t feel like that. There’s some real beauty here, but as many missteps as direct hits.
“Forest Gospel,” Live February 9, 2001. This is a bootleg from a radio show (at least it sounds that way) and very similar to the messiness of Hollinndagain.
Campfire Songs (2003). Campfire Songs was meant to be the name of the album and the band, which here consists of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Deakin (Josh Dibb), all strumming away on acoustic guitars and hitting some amazing Brian Wilson-style harmonies. With ambient noise in the background (thunderstorms, rain, birds: the sound of a screened porch on a Fall evening) providing a sense of landscape, this comes across like a recording of camp counselors full of acid attempting to recreate Brian Eno’s Music For Airports with their travel guitars. There’s not a coherent song in the bunch, but the strummed guitars and wordless singing is delightful, should you be into such a thing.
Here Comes The Indian (2003). Continuing their march into the wilderness, Indian is the first true Animal Collective album. All four of the artists are here, they had decided on the name, and the sound had gelled: lots of psychedelic loops, beats, noise, and electronics, folky strumming, sing-songy melodies that erupt into, well, animalistic screaming, otherworldly harmonies, and a willingness to push the envelope wherever the songs leads, all resulting in a perfectly weird Americana experience. This was also my introduction to the band, via a brilliant review of this album in which the author imagined Christopher Robin and his pals from the Hundred Acre Woods discussed Animal Collective while preparing for a rave. That review can be found in the 2003 Da Capo Best Music Writing collection, and this album is exactly like that review suggests.
Live in Bristol 10/21/2003 and At the Dublab Summer 2003. These are both single track mp3s of Animal Collective performances which I ganked from the Internet. There’s a few snippets of recognizable songs from Sung Tongs in and amongst the general weirdness. The Dublab performance is creepier than the Bristol one.
Sung Tongs (2004) and “Baby Day” (B-side to “Who Could Win A Rabbit?” single, 2004). In other contexts, this wouldn’t be so far on the accessible side of the equation, but this is one of Animal Collective’s best and most accessible albums. Heavy on the acoustic guitars, but the album balances the folk tendencies with loops and experimental sounds, and the whole is just as hazy and trippy and pleasantly disorienting as any drunken camping trip miles away from civilization with some of your oldest and most-loved friends. Here on the knife-edge of folk and skronk is one of my favorite places to be.
Feels (2005). As great as Sung Tongs is, Feels is my favorite and the best Animal Collective album. This is what summer days during college felt like when I didn’t have to work or go to school and had no plans other than hanging out with friends, jumping a fence to take an illegal dip in someone’s pool, hiking with my dog in the woods, driving out to The Cliffs to dive into a lake from 30 feet up, or sleeping in the sun because I was young and low on obligation. In other words: summer and freedom, with all of their dreamy, undirected, misdirected, glorious fun. Summer is what the songs appear to be about (I’m not that much into parsing their lyrics), but maybe that just how it feels (sorry, sorry, sorry). The sound still balances folk and electronic noise, but the poppiness takes a back seat, at least on the second side, to a mini-suite of laconic beauty that rivals Abbey Road or Smile.
Prospect Hummer EP (with Vashti Bunyan, 2005). Vashti Bunyan’s two solo albums, released with 25 years between them, are each as beautiful and timeless as a waterfall. She’s a favorite of the legendary producer and label-owner Joe Boyd, whose excellent memoir White Bicycles includes commentary on how much he believed in her talent despite her nonexistant sales. As he was with so many artists, Boyd was dead-right. This collaboration is perfectly pastoral, with Bunyan’s honey-smooth voice dripping over Animal Collective’s sometimes sharp edges. An album-length collaboration might be a bit much, but this EP is about the perfect length.
Grass single (2006), Peacebone EP (2007), and People EP (2007). Since “Grass” is on Feels, I have only the two B-sides of the single. “Fickle Cycle” is not all that great, and “Must Be Treeman” is actively annoying. ”Peacebone” is also on Strawberry Jam, but this came out first, so I bought the single as wells as the B-sides. B-side, singular, really. The only track that isn’t “Peacebone” or a remix thereof is “Safer,” which is practically ambient with noise and unusually clear vocal (for Animal Collective, at least) front and center. The two remixes are neither necessary or illuminating. In fact, the Black Dice remix is also annoying (they attempt some sort of approximation of the sound of the tape being eaten a la Neu! 2, but it just doesn’t work) and the Pantha Du Prince remix is just plain boring. I like the song “People,” even though there is almost nothing to it. This EP has a studio version and a live version. The other songs are decent, too, if not as immediately arresting as anything on Feels or Sung Tongs.
Y8c
Strawberry Jam (2007) and Water Curses EP (2008). Strawberry Jam is the next full-length album after Feels, and I found it a bit of a disappointment at first. The music seemed colder, relying more on loops and noise over guitars and drums and losing, in the process, the neat mix of organic and artificial that marks Animal Collective’s best work. Pushing the vocals to the foreground was also not such a great move, because Avey Tare’s lyrics are just not that clever as his way of singing them, at least on these songs. Despite my initial disappointment the album has grown on me over time. It’s poppier and a little pushier about being music to dance to, but there’s nothing wrong with that. At all. Water Curses features some outtakes from the album that are sadder and more stripped-back. Because I’m Mr. Melancholy Woe Is Me, I liked them right away.
Merriweather Post Pavilion and Fall Be Kind EP (both 2009). Deakin, the band’s main guitarist, took a break in 2009 and the group decided to pull a classic expectation-reversals. The music herein is even more loop-based and noisy, and yet instead of being even more experimental and dark, the sound is poppier and sunnier than ever. In fact, the band has sort of settled into a role that’s hard to describe without making up a word like technohippyish, and one of the tracks on the EP even features a sanctioned sample from the Grateful Dead. This doesn’t matter to me, but I suppose it does indicate where they’re coming from.
So, as you can see, this is perfect music for Osama bin Laden or Noam Chomsky or anyone else who hates consumerism, because hating consumerism is exactly the same as being a peace-loving (wait, did I parse that right?) terrorist who digs poppy psychedelia. Anyone with a ironic t-shirt and a high-falutin’ book on semiotics by that commie Sean Penn under their arm could tell you that! That is, they could tell you if you could stand the stink of being around those long-haired hippies! Am I right? Haw haw haw. Vote for Nixon.
Sweet these guys opened up for that band Al Qaeda at the Filmore! Hell of a show.