2004's release "Sung Tongs" had W&H wondering "Where will they go from here?" and deciding on balance that "God only knows."
Well, God hasn't let us down. "Feels" continues the long story (seven albums now) of restless invention and delightful music. Four core musicians rather than "Sung Tong's" two gives it a richer, almost MERCURY REV-like sound. Light voices in higher registers are complemented by layers and layers of organic percussion and impossibly constructed orchestras of conventional and synthesised instruments.
At first hearing it could be an album of normal pop music. But hurdy-gurdy, birdsong, ambient forest clearings, disguised guitars and giddyingly out-of-scale drum and choir sounds confound and delight a listener who has taken the trouble to move inside and listen.
The audio scenery is a wonderful construction of impossibly combined sounds and levels. We have come to take auditory illusions of popular music for granted now. We don't notice that a whispering singer standing next to a an electric guitar can still be heard. But ANIMAL COLLECTIVE seem to remind us of how strange the whole recording process has become and how little we can take for granted about what is real, what is manufactured and how worthless words like "ambient" "electronic" and "acoustic" have become.
Track one, "Did you see the Words?", is a sparkling manifesto for this new freshness. It’s upbeat and joyous in a POLYPHONIC SPREE / GO! TEAM kind of way, but with serious musical integrity. If it isn’t a single I expect it probably will be. You can hear all the intelligence of XTC, TALKING HEADS and other icons of current (but less weighty) purveyors of contemporary pop. But you can also hear large waves of entirely original and engaging sound.
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"Grass" starts with quasi tribal noises that get smothered in a huge tuned drum sound and layers and layers of conversational singing and percussive screaming. It really is delightful. Those recording sessions in Seattle must have been extraordinary. The producer was Scott Coulbourne and contributions from Eyvind Kang and Kristin Anna Valtysdottir were added to the four principals: Avey Tare, Panda, Geologist and Deakin.
I can understand that some folk might feel that some of this is just too rich. In "The Purple Bottle" for example the rush of new sounds boils so fast that just trying to follow it is like trying to look in the windows of houses as your train hurtles past a village. But when a single voice chants against a single autoharp on "Bees", getting gradually enveloped by clouds of harmony, the point of it all is much more obvious. The slide into surreality in the last section is all the more chilling for the purity and clarity of the earlier parts.
My point is that this is not "weird" music by any stretch of the imagination. It is beautiful, palatable music that has massive sales potential as well as astonishing artistry. In this sense it shares a space with people like Bjork, Sigur Ros and Tom Waits. A penny just needs to drop here and there – no massive change of perspective is called for. Try it. Be patient.
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