It's possible to listen to and discuss this album by married couple Avey Tare (real name: David Portner; main gig: Animal Collective) and Kria Brekkan (aka Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, formerly of Múm, lots of guest appearances since) on a conceptual plane. As has been widely disseminated in the online community, Pullhair Rubeye was essentially complete last December when, prompted in part by a viewing of director David Lynch's Inland Empire, Portner and Valtýsdóttir decided to reverse the tapes and release the album with all the songs running backward.
There's plenty of experimental music out there-- long drones, say-- where such a move might have gone unnoticed; this isn't one of them. The original tapes consisted of earthy, folky songs of simple construction consisting of mostly acoustic guitar, piano, and voice. Some potentially interesting questions crop up. Portner and Valtýsdóttir knew lots of people would re-reverse the record to hear its source; indeed, plenty of computer-savvy fans have already "fixed" Pullhair Rubeye, and-- what do you know-- in its original form, it's a damn nice album.
Though Portner and Valtýsdóttir's main projects have little in common, here they are aesthetically simpatico. Relative to the dark material Portner released on his half of a 2003 split EP, these tracks show him with an interest in singsong melody and childlike simplicity as pronounced as that of his partner-in-crime Panda Bear. And while I am no fan of Valtýsdóttir's infantilized coo of a voice, I like it in this context better than anywhere outside the first Múm record. So I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye. They are enjoyable. And the computer-savvy downloaders helped make them.
Another point of interest: there is something compelling about how "acoustic" music can become "electronic" merely by running the tape backward. In their original form, these are "songs;" reversed, if they are going to be appreciated at all, these "songs" are heard as "ambient pieces." So yeah, conceptually, Pullhair Rubeye might have something on the ball, and I'm always a fan of playful gestures. But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.
For me personally, the irony is that I've long considered myself the biggest sucker ever born for the simple backward effect. In reviews I've praised passages for their "disorientation" and "peculiar sense of longing" that were no more than a couple of notes tapped out on a piano and flipped over in Pro Tools. I admit it; it's easy to pull off, but backward instruments can still get to me. Probably all that time as a kid spent listening for Satanic back-masking when I should have been outside playing kick the can (or maybe it was those Beatles records).
A whole album of this one effect, however, the reverse piano and reverse guitar and reverse voices going from decay to attack over and over and over again for 31 minutes... man, it's not just boring, it actually becomes depressing. It all kind of bleeds together into one bland and undifferentiated sonic blob that I never need to hear again. That's one nice thing about living when we do, though: Unlike Lou Reed fans with Metal Machine Music or Flaming Lips fans with Zaireeka, no one is going to pick this up on a whim without knowing what they're getting into. The information is out there. Everyone who knows and cares about the Animal Collective, everyone who follows the doings of Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, all these folks also spend time online and so know Pullhair Rubeye's story. So it's not a rip-off, at least, we have to give them that. It's also no fun whatsoever to listen to.
