Listening to Animal Collective is like high diving into a pool filled with light in the most beautiful colors no one has ever seen before.
this song is like if you dropped some acid, then a jellyfish took you into outerspace and then it had babies and the babies created a planet out of waffles and you were the king of that planet. thats kinds like exactly what this song is.
The galloping opener "Peacebone" sets the scene; Animal Collective don't seem exactly like a rock band on Strawberry Jam. There are odd sounds of indeterminate origin, and textures vaguely associated with circus music crop up regularly. Here, the melodic buoyancy and junk-shop keyboards stomping along behind Avey Tare's voice create a ramshackle backdrop for a story of a monster in a maze, strange fossils in a natural history museum, and plenty of other stuff (when Avey gets rolling, he's pretty verbose).
The story of this record for me, though, is the strength of Avey Tare's voice, and how his singing anchors these songs, invigorates the band's idiosyncratic melodies, and offers a clear portal into Animal Collective's utopian dreamworld.
Avey Tare's tone has never been as aching and pure as Panda Bear's, but his is the more versatile instrument. Wild intervallic leaps-- jumping up and down full octaves, or going from a full-throated howl to a piercing shriek-- have long been his trademark, and it's something that bugs a lot of people. That makes sense: His vocal style is peculiar, and could easily strike some as affected. But the way he negotiates a song like the fourth track here, "For Reverend Green", shows just how well he can adapt his singing to fit the needs of the song.
Over a repeating guitar delay that sounds a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" and an organ seemingly pulled from the midway of a county fair, Avey follows the contours of "For Revered Green"'s sing-song melody but never seems bound by it. He explodes with a scream every line or two for emphasis-- not to highlight a word, but to convey the idea of feelings spilling over the edges of the song's expansive container. It's a sound and point-of-view associated now with only one band. A backing of "whoo-oo-oo" vocals working in counterpart to the main melody only reinforce how distinctive Animal Collective's sound has become. Here, more than on any record yet, they own that sound completely.
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