Have you ever slept through your alarm? Maybe you’re midway through a dream where you finally get that promotion, or one where you’re on the best date of your life. But throughout all the wish fulfillment, a faint siren keeps ringing. Your unconscious worked the alarm’s chime into your slumber. This is the feeling of listening to Croz Boyce’s “Abundant Zap River”: soothing yet disconcerting, Avey Tare’s plucked guitar and Geologist’s whirring electronics coming together like clangs invading your dreams. On their first album under the moniker, the two noisemakers from Animal Collective delight in this combination, foregrounding campfire acoustics while sinister drones lurk around the corner.
For decades, Animal Collective has operated fluidly, allowing for various collaborations and solo endeavors. Croz Boyce isn’t the first time Avey Tare and Geologist (born Dave Portner and Brian Weitz, respectively) have worked together without the rest of their bandmates; the duo has put out a handful of releases as New Psycho Actives, and also traveled to the Amazon to work on the manipulated nature samples and shaggy guitar figures of the 2017 AnCo EP Meeting of the Waters. But where Portner seemed adrift in busy harmonies on that EP, Croz Boyce is a comparatively unhurried, almost entirely instrumental project. It’s two lifelong friends tossing ideas back and forth, spiking gorgeous guitar patterns with unexpected effects and samples.
Of course, Portner has long been comfortable with building up and tearing down guitar motifs, dating back to the early days of Animal Collective—most notably with his spaced-out strumming on 2004’s hypnotic Sung Tongs. His approach to the instrument is sparser here, relying on wrung-out chords and sunny noodling. Taking a lesson from the project’s namesake, David Crosby, and the open-ended collaboration that went into his album If Only I Could Remember My Name, Portner’s pastoral acoustic guitars sit at the center of Croz Boyce. But Weitz’s scratches of synth and interjections of hurdy-gurdy—the instrument at the heart of his solo debut—complicate the surface-level beauty. Some of Weitz’s glitches seem to sprout off the guitar arrangements, adding unnerving shadows.
Weitz’s additions push these songs to thrillingly unexpected places. At one moment, a synth might recall a baby crying; later, it might sound like a penny colliding with water. “Towson Acid” starts with the passing coziness of “Sister Golden Hair” before Weitz constructs a proper groove, tom-toms firing off at random. For a few measures of “Father Karras,” the circus comes to town but remains separated from the listener by a concrete wall. The self-explanatory “Eternal Dream Drone” climaxes with what sounds like a J Mascis-style fuzz solo from Portner, but it could just as easily be one of Weitz’s warped noise samples. The repetitions on “Eternal Dream Drone” start to play tricks on you: Levitating acoustic chords seem to speed up, while electronics fade in and out. When the final note rings out, you feel both transported—and like you’re still standing in the same place.
It could be easy to dismiss Croz Boyce as merely a collection of doodles, especially given the duo’s laidback approach to its creation. Inspired by Animal Collective’s process for 2022’s Time Skiffs, which they recorded remotely during the pandemic, Portner started leaving Laurel Canyon-indebted sketches in a Dropbox folder for Weitz to toy with. The songs came together slowly, built from those half-formed ideas sitting in cyberspace. But listen closely and you’ll hear a real sense of connection in these songs, between two friends who have known each other since ninth grade and now live hours apart. It’s a game of telephone happening through the clicks and hisses, a testament to the fact that, after over 30 years of making music together, Portner and Weitz can still surprise you with where they’re headed next.
