By: David Schultz

Upon the release of Feels, their third full length album, Animal Collective received an inordinate amount of critical acclaim for their brand of atmospheric psychedelic folk music. Appearing on numerous Best Of 2005 lists, the eclectic quartet, now based out of Brooklyn, received laudatory accolades from all corners, hailing their ambitious album as "groundbreaking." Animal Collective's sound has evolved over time and on Feels, they come across as a wonderfully weird mix of Perry Farrell at his most experimental and The Beach Boys at their most harmonious. Able to create meditative soothing soundscapes, Animal Collective will also go tribal and often atonal, at times suddenly and always unexpectedly.

Given all the fine press, Animal Collective's performance last Thursday at Webster Hall, the first of two sold-out New York City shows, unsurprisingly generated a high curiosity factor. A majority of the audience watched the Collective's two hour set in stunned semi-silence, unsure how to express appreciation for the dysfunctional display on stage. Quite a few people at Webster Hall came to check out the Collective purely on the buzz surrounding the band and, for the first few songs, watched puzzlingly before leaving. While a late night show will tire out even the most devoted of crowds, Animal Collective may have lost an eighth of the crowd out of sheer distaste.

Quite simply, Animal Collective is not your typical band. Anyone expecting a traditional rock and roll show will be mystified by their audibly disruptive live performance. First off, Animal Collective likes to scream and Dave Portner, also known as Avey Tare, will let loose with shrieks and howls at the most unexpected times, even during the most serene moments of a song. The Collective also does not hesitate to interject a guitar slash or cymbal crash, seemingly at random, into otherwise peaceful music. The percussion comes primarily from drummer Noah Lennox, also known as Panda Bear. Lennox remarkably stands throughout the entire performance making his thunderous drumming an impressive feat. Guitarist Josh Dibb, also known as Deakin, and electronics player Brian Weitz, otherwise known as Geologist, stepped away from their instruments at different points in the evening, picked up a spare drum stick and assisted Lennox by haphazardly bashing on a cymbal.

The soundscapes come from the electronics of Brian Weitz. In accordance with his nickname, "Geologist" dons a cave explorer's helmet on stage, complete with high intensity lamp that peers out into the audience obscuring a clear look at his face. With the lamp intensifying every gesture of his head, Weitz' constant movement, while he generates an assortment of hums and beats by fiddling with various dials and knobs, becomes disconcerting and a bit distracting.

Animal Collective does not aspire to antagonize their audience in the punk rock sense, but their music, although ostensibly soothing, is not meant to comfort. When Animal Collective drifts into the realm of psychedelic music, they do it without the high octane guitar or soothing trippy effects normally associated with the genre. Their unsettling shrieking and cacophony of noise creates a demented vibe that could easily be the soundtrack of a bad acid trip or provide interpretive background music for Charles Manson's delusional hippie ramblings. Too many of the Collective's songs seem like intros, sounding promising but never leading anywhere. However, as evidenced on Feels, it's not that Animal Collective's unable to create pleasant harmonies and melodies, it's just that they apparently choose not to, seeing a different vision for their music.

During "The Purple Bottle" and "Grass," two exceptional songs from Feels, you get a sense as to where Animal Collective's raves originate. Without compromising or departing from their untraditional sound, they possess an ability to embed enjoyable melodies into their music. At two or three times during the show, Animal Collective abandoned the free form discordance and connected with the entire crowd. However, those moments were few and far between, as for the most part, Animal Collective chose to provide atmosphere mixed with dissonance.

Animal Collective's Webster Hall show equates to a museum trip to see an exhibit on the art of the grotesque. While taking notice of the horrifying absence of beauty and feeling disgust for the celebration of the macabre, you can still find an appreciation for the art underneath. While the band did bring the atmospheric soundscapes present on Feels to the stage, they interrupted them constantly with screams. Too often their performance degenerated into pretentious and indulgent excursions into tribal rhythms and atonal noise. Appropriately, the show ended in the middle of one of Portner's screams.

Even those who earnestly subscribe to the philosophy of "to each his own" might be hard pressed to rationalize the overly fawning accolades being heaped upon Animal Collective. Perhaps it's come to the point where music critics have become inundated with so much homogeneous music that anything as vastly unusual as Animal Collective stands out simply by the distinctly radical approach they take towards their music. However, using this same logic, critics would then be expected to praise an artist that accompanies their primal screaming by banging two live cats together, applauding the artist for their untraditional vision and celebrating their entry into territories once thought unnavigable . . . and no, that wasn't what Animal Collective did for their encore.

Labels: Animal Collective