Avey Tare’s solo records have always sounded like opportunities to break away from whatever Animal Collective was doing at the time. Co-founder Panda Bear’s solo work has roughly followed the group’s trajectory, morphing from folksy and melancholy to expansive and dubwise to shroomy and feral on a parallel path. Avey, meanwhile, released a willfully frustrating album meant to be played backwards just as his band was becoming the toast of American indie rock; got swampy and personal on Down There just as Merriweather Post Pavilion pushed them into bigger venues; made the sprawling and sparse Eucalyptus a year after AnCo’s hyperkinetic Painting With; then embraced dance music on Cows on Hourglass Pond just as his main band was starting to make music that… sounded like Eucalyptus.
Now, as Animal Collective rides the success of last year’s rhythm-driven road odyssey Time Skiffs, regaining some of the goodwill lost in their long 2010s wilderness period (one worth revisiting now that it no longer exists in Merriweather’s monumental shadow), here’s an Avey Tare album in the long tradition of baroque-pop hermits hunched over keyboards and consoles, a showcase for studio trickery that sounds the most out of any Avey Tare solo work like the great psychedelic Beatles and Beach Boys albums to which AnCo’s early music was frequently compared.
7s is rooted in demos Avey made early in the pandemic while living with his girlfriend Madelyn and working remotely with AnCo on Time Skiffs. This situation accounts for its unusual, slightly disarming tone: It’s a head-over-heels-in-love album, full of invitations to come and do whimsical things, but it’s also prickly and insular. If the influence of house and techno led Cows on Hourglass Pond to feel extroverted, 7s is a vision of a world where the clubs are shuttered and the walls are closing in. It’s not Avey’s shortest album (that would be Down There, at 34:44), but it feels the smallest, in part because it has the fewest tracks (seven) and in part because it continually retreats towards its own center.
Avey is blessed with an excellent scream. You will not hear it on 7s. His vocals are uncharacteristically reserved throughout, thinning to a whisper on the sickly-sounding “Cloud Stop Rest Start” and at the end of “Lips at Night.” At 43, his voice has grown huskier and deeper, and he’s developed a lisp that’s also audible on Time Skiffs. As is common in his work, his vocals squirm through effects that make them sound oily and slightly nauseous, but unlike on Cows and Eucalyptus, this has the effect of making them less comprehensible. Even on a focused listen, you’ll probably only understand about 50 percent of the words.
This turns out to be a blessing. 7s does not benefit from reading the lyrics, which are crammed with grammatically bizarre turns of phrase (“Your corporeal tube doesn’t seek me out from the fishies/I relish a homemade cast”) and pseudo-deep platitudes that make “Stairway to Heaven” sound profound (“Too often we are our villains and our heroes/Save ourselves and then we dig ourselves a fresh tomb”). The psychedelic pop tradition is conducive to nonsense, from the sly non-sequiturs of the Beatles to the impossibly evocative scenes conjured by Van Dyke Parks and Robert Hunter. But there’s good nonsense and bad nonsense, and 7s unfortunately errs on the wrong side.
The album’s strongest lyrics tend to be the simplest and most direct, especially on “The Musical,” a song about Avey’s two decades in the music biz. “Is your audience the trees, or do you crave to be a professional?” he asks aspiring musicians. It’s an expression of hard-won road-warrior knowledge that still shines with gratitude and amazement. “I remember T&C and I’ll surely remember your hand in mine,” Avey sings to Madelyn on “Lips at Night.” Listeners are unlikely to understand what he’s saying in the first half of the line, let alone what it means, but as his voice crests in the second half, the brain fog parts, and the declaration of love shines through.
7s works best seen as a whole, as a triumph of love and empathy over adversity. It’s hard to know who Avey Tare is singing about on “Invisible Darlings,” though some of the language echoes early-pandemic sentiment towards essential workers, but the sense of opening one’s heart to the world is unmistakable. “Lips at Night” plays like gibberish until all of a sudden Avey says something like “we kissed,” and then it becomes a love song. Like the B-movie horror films that Avey loves, it’s better if you don’t nitpick the script. And though 7s is a step down in scale and inspiration from Cows on Hourglass Pond, the triumph of Time Skiffs means it’s hardly a worrying sign for his career. It’s actually kind of exciting. I can’t wait to see if the next AnCo album sounds like 7s—and how far opposite from it Avey can get.
