Here's another re-write of that old "not that many people saw the Velvet Underground play but everyone who did started a band"-adage: A fair amount of people have seen Animal Collective play and lots of them bought five Halloween masks, three samplers, two drum machines, and started an art-rock collective. It's no fun to damn a group with "X sounds like Y," but AC comparisons will dog Au the way White Stripes follow the Black Keys: a series of prevalent but not insurmountable similarities. For all the sonic elements-- trebly guitars, cacophonous vocal outbursts, trembling pianos-- they share with AC, it's important to note that Au are decidedly un-weird, not freaky: They are less a group of forest children re-inventing music than an orchestral rock band playing a lot louder and having a lot more fun than most of its peers.
Ultimately the keystone influence for Au-- as hinted by a song from Au leader Luke Wyland's 2005 debut (as "luc"), peaofthesea, "Faith(LouieLouie)Enter"-- may be garage rock band the Kingsmen and their garbled syllabic nonsense. And while Wyland is decidedly the center of the Au universe, Verbs is a "band" album, distilling the efforts of Wyland, Jonathan Sielaff, and Mark Kaylor-- as well as contributions from fellow Portlanders and members of Yellow Swans and Parenthetical Girls. These additions are easy to spot-- guests stop by to play banjos and clarinets instead of "sequencer" or "effects"; the weirdest instrument listed in the somewhat meticulous liners is an amplified accordion-- lending Verbs a transparency and heartiness that Au peers Akron/Family or Caribou sometimes lack.
Verbs' best moments come off like a band camp jam gone artfully haywire. The long instrumental midsection of "All Myself" features a fluttering clarinet and budding trombone before a tapping cymbal adds firmness. "The Waltz" is also highlighted by a clarinet-- wailing, this time-- and the aforementioned accordion, which between them make for a surprisingly seamless swarm'n'drone. "Summerheat" begins with lazily cawing saws before sporadically erupting with percussion and ringing amplifiers. Wyland's clever, too: he follows the sunshine-big gospel choruses of "All My Friends" with the ape-cage percussion and barreling organ of "Are Animals". Wyland doesn't have a bad set of pipes, but he's more productive as a de facto orchestra director than as a proper tunesmith: his neck-straining leads the way during "Summerheat" and "The Waltz", ushering his pals in and out of the mix, guiding their rabble-rousing with his own see-sawing intensity.
Only during Verbs' most ponderous and deliberate moments-- the quiet coda "Sleep", the late morning simmer of "Two Seasons"-- does the album's vibrancy and bluster erode. Parts of Verbs feel deliberately uptempo and chirpy, but even at its most forced the album represents a win for Wyland, who has finally aimed his off-kilter psychedelia in a direction worth pursuing.
