I was introduced to Animal Collective by this website. Andy Beta's June 2003 review of Here Comes the Indian, paired with a strong off-site recommendation from Dominque Leone, led me to believe that this band could be worth my while. It took some time to confirm. Here Comes the Indian didn't take immediately, but the deal was finally sealed in August of that year, during a surreal trip through the Virginia wilderness.
I was in rural Buckingham County, driving alone, an hour or so after nightfall, and it started to rain. Little sprinkles at first, and then a heavy downpour, punctuated by huge explosions of lightning that turned the dark woods into daylight. It was the kind of rain where you can only see about 20 feet in front of your car and you're constantly wondering if you should pull off to the side and wait it out. But the road was empty and straight, so I pressed on. While all this was going on, I was listening Here Comes the Indian at high volume. It wasn't pleasurable in the usual sense, but it was intense. The echoing vocals and rustling noise of "Infant Dressing Table", in particular, scared the living crap out of me-- especially in my state of elevated stress. But it was also hugely exhilarating and, in its own way, beautiful. There was something to this band after all.
Since then I've gone backward in Animal Collective's catalog while simultaneously spending a lot of time with each new release. It's an uneven body of work, to be sure, but they're a terrifically fun band to follow closely. You're never quite sure what's going to come next, and their music tends to hold up to many plays remarkably well. Of the early pre-*Indian * stuff, the rare live album Hollinndagain-- originally a vinyl-only issue limited to 300 copies-- contains some of their strongest material. It captures the band in 2001, performing in the WFMU studios and in New York, Nashville, and Austin while touring with Black Dice. Animal Collective at this point was a noisy, neo-tribal band in the vein of their tourmates, using crude noisemakers, pedals, acoustic guitars, and drums to bash out their own version of abstract ritual music. But where Black Dice convey a vaguely menacing sense of nihilism, Animal Collective project something comparatively warmer and more delicate-- even when they're playing manic bursts of unpredictable clatter.
Detractors hear in the five-minute mush that begins the opening "I See You Pan" three dudes (Deaken wasn't in the band at this point) randomly diddling with analog noisemakers, but Animal Collective understand as well as any band today the power of contrast. This shapeless opening is what gives the echoing vocal loops in the second half-- Panda Bear's fragile trapped-in-the-machine glitch-- their vibrant and faintly sad energy. This leads uninterrupted into "Pride and Fight"; backing Panda Bear is just foot stomps and some chanting from Avey Tare, setting up the moment when the heavy downstrokes of the acoustic guitars and some tom-tom bashing push the song into a completely hypnotic realm. Geologist's gurgling synths, combined with the chanting and wailing vocals, owe much to the sun worship of Boredoms, another band that hears noise and chaos as a healing, rather than destructive force.
"Forest Gospel", which closes out what is essentially a single 17-minute song, is considerably more intense, with someone chanting and then screaming, "You pull out the prick/ You pull out the stick," as Panda performs furiously sloppy drum rolls. It's difficult to say exactly what it means, but it seems like it's about someone hurting or being hurt, and normally such an aggressive musical expression leads me to wonder which side of a violent situation is being represented. But Animal Collective offer a third possibility-- that, like the Boredoms, their music treats noise and aggression in a more abstract manner, the volume existing as a celebratory end in itself rather than tied to anything specific and easily identifiable.
The back half of the record-- four snippets recorded on tour-- is more free-floating and atmospheric, as voices are treated with delay and distortion and folded into a colorful soup of electronic sound. It's not nearly as engaging as the record's first half, save a few bits of "Pumpkin Get a Snakebite" where the band becomes a few clicks more unhinged, but it effectively creates a shifting, textured dark ambience that's even more compelling for being captured live in a room.
Taken as a whole, Hollinndagain is a convincing demonstration that Animal Collective were bursting with ideas and imagination even at an early stage. It's amazing to think of where they were at that point in 2003, when Here Comes the Indian and glowing acoustic drone Campfire Songs were hitting shelves, this live album and their first two studio records already circulating. Here was a band that could go anywhere. No one would guess they'd spend their next two full-lengths incorporting more conventional indie rock touchstones, which happened to be a sound they're also remarkably good at-- although it's hard not to wish that they might step back for a minute to this time, when the road first forked, and see if another trail might be cut.
