Tracklist:

1. I See You Pan
2. Pride and Fight
3. Forest Gospel
4. There's an Arrow
5. Lablakely Dress
6. Tell it to the Mountain
7. Pumpkin Gets a Snakebite

To say that this isn’t the Animal Collective much of the world has come to love or at least admire would be an understatement. The band existent on this rerelease of a 2001 live album is one so feral that it is hard to see how it developed into the creative genius behind albums like Sung Tongs.

This incarnation of Animal Collective is one devoid of the free-flowing stream of consciousness choral vocals that imbue the best AC tracks with their unique brand of genius. All too often the band berate your ears with a bucket full of noise, but not the type that has a purpose as in their later albums. This can be attributed to a number of things, including the lack of truly feeling that anyone would ever listen to them, and therefore they could indulge in whatever they felt like.

Secondly, this is clearly a less mature Animal Collective, one that can spend the first ten minutes (and first track) of their album singing in their trademark style over a collage of noise that is entirely aimless and entirely irritating. I am not one to be irritated by experimentation, but there has to be some artistic vision otherwise anyone could do the same and label it “experimental”.

Fortunately, the Collective redeem themselves slightly in the next track which is an a capella chain of long drones composing the lead vocals and atonal whelps, claps and eventual percussion forming the background. “Pride and Fight”’s eventual climax, in which the drums meet the vocals and compete for aural territory, is truly astounding and results in one of Animal Collective’s best efforts and should impress even those who have heard all their albums.www

The combination of this track and the next which also features work reflective of their most recent albums save Hollinndagain from complete unlistenable status. “Forest Gospel” features the same splenetic percussion and vocals that has made the band so loveable as well as a more electronic element that they have lost over the years.

The album’s closing twenty minutes are composed mainly (okay, “There’s An Arrow” is tolerable) of an unlistenable abstract sound collage that tempts the listener to turn the disc off and throw it out the window. But now that we’re fortunate enough to know what this band has become, something that is closer the mid section of this album and involving only the best elements of the two ends, we listen. We listen because anyone with an interest in any artist wants to see their beginnings in an attempt to better understand them, and this is just that, a band’s beginnings: nothing more, nothing less.

MP3:
Forest Gospel
Pride and Fight

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Record Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.