Whether out of a creative need to one-up themselves or a conscious effort to hold on to the wider audience they’d built up in the wake of Merriweather Post Pavilion, each of Animal Collective’s last few LPs have been busier, zanier, and more eager to awe the last. By last year’s Painting With, all that forced jubilation had begun to sound cloying or even pandering, which, ironically, is the last thing anybody wants from this band. That may explain why increasingly some of the best Animal Collective music has come not from their group efforts but from their many side projects.
Recorded with Animal Collective part-timer Josh Dibb, Avey Tare’s Eucalyptus could never be accused of pandering—no album as slack and rickety as this has sights on the masses—yet in some ways it embodies a romantic ideal that’s nearly as sure-fire as Merriweather’s imagining of a perfect pop album: the reclusive, personal record, written seemingly with no expectation that anybody will even hear it. That it’s steeped in pain and heartbreak only further heightens its mystique. Dave Portner’s last solo album as Avey Tare, Down There, had its share of sorrows, too, but that album was unmistakably a studio creation, an efficient 35 minutes of tunes and rhythms. Eucalyptus is near twice the length but has less to prove. Unafraid to meander, it finds a golden ratio between inspiration and indifference.
Like this spring’s Meeting of the Waters EP, the album pivots away from the synapse-frying maximalism of recent Animal Collective releases and returns to the primal spirit of the group’s formative records. On Waters, Portner and Brian “Geologist” Weitz took the live-in-the-wild aesthetic of those early albums to new extremes, recording it near the Amazon River, where the rustling rainforest served as a sort of incidental backing band. Eucalyptus’ origins aren’t nearly so dramatic. As Portner tells it, he wrote the bulk of the album in his bedroom in 2014, sapping inspiration per usual from his surroundings, in this case, the rugged terrain of California’s Big Sur mountains.
Even from the bedroom, Portner finds ways to convey the sounds of nature, but here they’re staged and artificial. The porcelain-fragile “Selection of a Place” first appeared as a “Rio Negro Version” on the Waters EP, set to a backdrop of cooing birds and chirping insects. With no wildlife to provide the white noise, for the Eucalyptus version Portner turns to electronics to replicate that hiss, closing the track with a blare of digitized bird calls. Similarly on “Coral Lords,” a treatise on marine ecology with the fidelity of a ham radio broadcast, a whoosh of dead-air static stands in for the sound of rushing water.
Though its songs are lightly augmented with overdubs and outside voices, as well as the faintest outlines of orchestrations from Eyvind Kang, Eucalyptus retains its air of bedroom intimacy. The joyful standout “Jackson 5” feels like a shoebox diorama of the full-blown carnival that Animal Collective might have built it into, and it’s all the more affable for it. Likewise, the cattle-ranch country romp “Ms. Secret” downplays its inherent audacity, with Portner keeping a straight face as he adopts a ridiculous loose-jawed drawl. The album’s riskiest vocal performance, though, belongs to “PJ,” where he imagines an encounter with a departed friend. “Was on a beach and met PJ/But he died on a winter’s day,” Portner warbles, in the high, fluttery voice of a villager from an old Casper cartoon, shell-shocked by their brush with the beyond. He sells both emotions, the lurid giddiness of sharing a ghost tale, and the very real grief of losing someone you love.
The sense of loss is even more overt on Eucalyptus’ closing track, and the one that cements the record as an uncharacteristically personal work, “When You Left Me.” Portner even directs its closing verse at himself. “Gonna say that I’m thankful that all the years passed away/Avey, give me wisdom of your many years to come/Hear me even though I’m distances away,” he sings, echoing the hopes of any romantic who’s longed to preserve their bond with an ex. Life usually doesn’t work out that way, yet nonetheless there’s an optimism underlying Portner’s account of separated lovers who still have a lot to learn from each other. “Wanna bask in your ritual, finding the perfect day,” he repeats, pleadingly, turning it into a mantra that brings Eucalyptus full circle. How poetic that an album that devotes so much time to searching and seeking concludes with a vow to continue doing exactly that.
