In March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.
On Strawberry Jam, the new album from Animal Collective, it's Avey Tare's turn. It's not that Strawberry Jam resembles a solo album, or that Avey (aka Dave Portner) seems to dominate to an unusual degree-- Panda Bear is unmistakably present too, along with sound processor Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) and guitarist Deakin (aka Josh Dibb). But the specifics of who's doing what have been shuffled, and the members' respective contributions-- including who's singing at any given moment-- aren't always easy to single out. The story of this record for me, though, is the strength of Avey Tare's voice, and how his singing anchors these songs, invigorates the band's idiosyncratic melodies, and offers a clear portal into Animal Collective's utopian dreamworld.
Avey Tare's tone has never been as aching and pure as Panda Bear's, but his is the more versatile instrument. Wild intervallic leaps-- jumping up and down full octaves, or going from a full-throated howl to a piercing shriek-- have long been his trademark, and it's something that bugs a lot of people. That makes sense: His vocal style is peculiar, and could easily strike some as affected. But the way he negotiates a song like the fourth track here, "For Reverend Green", shows just how well he can adapt his singing to fit the needs of the song.
Over a repeating guitar delay that sounds a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" and an organ seemingly pulled from the midway of a county fair, Avey follows the contours of "For Revered Green"'s sing-song melody but never seems bound by it. He explodes with a scream every line or two for emphasis-- not to highlight a word, but to convey the idea of feelings spilling over the edges of the song's expansive container. It's a sound and point-of-view associated now with only one band. A backing of "whoo-oo-oo" vocals working in counterpart to the main melody only reinforce how distinctive Animal Collective's sound has become. Here, more than on any record yet, they own that sound completely.
"For Reverend Green" fades into the structurally similar but tonally different "Fireworks", arguably forming the greatest back-to-back in the Animal Collective's catalog. "Fireworks" is about the pleasure of simple things, but also about how hard they can be to appreciate: "A sacred night where we'll watch the fireworks/ The frightened babies poo/ They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why/ They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes."
Animal Collective are never a band I listened to for lyrics-- on those early records, they were pretty hard to make out-- but the words in "Fireworks" match perfectly the song's complex mood: There's a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance. That it's all rendered so beautifully, with tempered banshee vocals, some spacey dub elements to kick off the middle break, and one of the band's best melodies-- and layered and varied enough to have had two or three good songs built from it-- reveals the band's mastery of complex, experimental pop songcraft.
The galloping opener "Peacebone" sets the scene; Animal Collective don't seem exactly like a rock band on Strawberry Jam. There are odd sounds of indeterminate origin, and textures vaguely associated with circus music crop up regularly. Here, the melodic buoyancy and junk-shop keyboards stomping along behind Avey Tare's voice create a ramshackle backdrop for a story of a monster in a maze, strange fossils in a natural history museum, and plenty of other stuff (when Avey gets rolling, he's pretty verbose).
The only thing expected from an Animal Collective record that's never quite delivered on Strawberry Jam is the long, dreamy, droney builder. The album's second half is slightly more abstract than the catchy pop that precedes it, but these moments are tempered, causing the record to feel more focused. "#1" opens with a repeating Terry Riley-esque pattern on what sounds like an early-70s synth, but this is a cleaner, simpler sort of experiment for Animal Collective. The lead vocal is pitched down and vaguely eerie, but Panda's bright backing vocals really carry the piece, which seems happy to drift along without going any place in particular. The track's lack of momentum differentiates it from, say, the songs on the looser second half of Feels, but it's got its own vibe and it works.
The record culminates with the thunderous "Cuckoo Cuckoo", its most explosive track, shifting between lyrical piano bits (not a lot of those on past Animal Collective records) to in-the-red surges of drums, guitar, and noisemakers. And then, after so many great Avey-fronted songs, Strawberry Jam closes with the folk-like "Derek", sung by Panda. The song begins with some lightly strummed guitar and water sounds and ends with crashing percussion and a refrain that sounds like a West African pop tune (a quality also present on the Panda-sung "Chores") merging with a Phil Spector-produced instrumental single. The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet ("Derek never woke up at night/ And in the morning he's ready to go/ And he never had a voice like you/ To scream when he wanted something"). In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact.
