Animal Collective

The Animal Collective was built around New York-based guitarist Avey Tare (real name David Portner) and drummer Panda Bear (real name Noah Lennox). Panda Bear (Soccer Star, 1999) had already presented a bizarre program of electronic folk music, at the intersection of Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and Brian Eno.

The duo debuted with the tenderly dissonant post-psychedelic electronica of Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (Animal, 2000). This extraterrestrial android vaudeville evokes the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev in their most anarchic ventures. The shorter pieces simply revel in their accustomed eccentricity. Spirit They've Vanished is a tentative ballad drenched in harsh electronic noise (no other instruments), basically a duet of voice and electronics. Drums and guitars debut in April & The Phantom, a spastic rave-up with pastoral vocals and whistles. Bat You'll Fly drowns in nostalgic keyboards and vocals that are looped around. The longer pieces, though, toy with creative processes to construct a song and let it evolve into something else. Buzzing electronics and terse piano notes slowly coalesce into the tender piano-based elegy of Penny Dreadfuls. The simple lullaby over vibrating organ of Chocolate Girl picks up strength as it goes, incorporating a loud bass, syncopated drumming and pastoral guitar, while the keyboards sound more and more alien. The 13-minute Alvin Row unleashes dissonant free-jazz jamming, a vibrant piano sonata, snippets of circus motifs, vocal sounds that are not quite singing and a samba-like percussive frenzy. It is all (deliberately) chaotic and unfocused, but nonetheless gentle. It is hard to pinpoint the rhythms and the arrangements, although the melodies are quite hummable and even serene. Cacophonous rock music had always been a game of subverting everything, while Animal Collective only subverts the instrumental parts.

Danse Manatee (Catsup Plate, 2001), recorded by Tare, Panda Bear, and Brian "Geologist" Weitz, adds more pop vocals but, in general, it is less song-oriented and more abstract. This festival of aborted ideas opens with the hissing and tinkling noises of A Manatee Danse. Some of the pieces evoke the anemic robotic songs of the Residents (Another White Singer, Throwin' The Round Ball), and some go way beyond that framework in terms of nuking the traditional song format (Loblakely Dress). The shabby psych-folk with sound effects Essplode opens another front, which the nine-minute Meet The Light Child attacks with no mercy for codified musical rules: a Syd Barrett-ian melody gets buried in a nightmare of random sounds before plunging into stark Nick Drake-ian musical nudity and ends up floating over dreamy collective interplay. It is even harder to pin down the percussive dance Runnin' The Round Ball and the stop-and-go singalong In The Singing Box. Sometimes the pieces decay and sometimes they grow and rise. The eight-minute The Living Toys disintegrates in a foggy landscape evoked by the tense vibrations of all the instruments and by very distant stoned singing; but, instead, the eight-minute Ahhh Good Country slowly morphs from a loud cosmic hissing coupled with a deep rumble into a hyper-languid dreamy litany that in turns slowly morphs into a Laurie Anderson-ian lullaby over an ever more powerful beat created by several percussion instruments in unison. Nothing is professional and all is manically (childishly?) disorienting, but the overall effect is actually of a very focused intelligence, except that it is difficult to express in traditional terms the focus of this deviant intelligence.

Hollinndagain (St Ives, 2002 - Paw Tracks, 2006) documents live jams by the Animal Collective.

The split personality of Danse Manatee was resolved on Campfire Songs (Catsup Plate, 2003) in favor of the folk-pop ego. The collection is just what the title implies: acoustic campfire songs, recorded live outdoors; but the psychedelic factor is as high as ever (peacking with the closing, 11-minute De Soto De Son) The line-up now included vocalist and guitarist Josh Dibb a.k.a. Deakin.

Here Comes The Indian (Paw, 2003), finally credited to the Animal Collective, is even more erratic and amoebic. The twelve-minute musique-concrete fantasia Two Sails On A Sound assembles a smooth collage of unrelated sounds, and concocts an organic flow of instrumental and found sounds. Its nonchalance is even more striking than their trademark demented orgies. It is ambient music by comparison with what comes next. A linear evolution of sorts is also implemented in Infant Dressing Table (8:35), in which sampled and repeated vocals are part of the messy, alien, wildly dissonant sonic stew. The hyperkinetic voodoobilly of Slippi (2:49) pulverizes whatever quiet has been created by the first track, and paves the way for the agonizing, totally distorted meditation of Too Soon (6:27), and the dadaistic nightmare of Hey Light (5:41), which sounds like the band of the mental asylum covering the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. These are pieces with absolutely no structure. The whirlwind of free vocals of Panic (4:48) is at least cohesive. The Animal Collective new resides firmly on the soundsculpting side of the musical universe. Rhythms and melodies have been subjected to a process of purification and distillation resulting in a complete loss of identity.

The Animal Collective tempered its quirkiness on Sung Tongs (Fat Cat, 2004), but losing quite a bit of its credibility on the bossanova-sounding kitsch of Leaf House, the singalong acoustic folk of Winters Love, the baroque harmonies of Who Could Win A Rabbit, and the 12-minute nostalgic fantasia Visiting Friends, in a vein that updates the Beach Boys' high-pitched multi-part harmonies to the post-rock world. Despite the percussive nightmare of We Tigers, the demented psalm of Mouth Wooed Her and the psychedelic ditties Kids on Holiday and Whaddit I Done, the album's streamlined and simplified approach almost negates everything the Animal Collective stood for.

Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox's mini-album Young Prayer (Paw, 2004) contains nine somber (untitled) elegies for voice, guitar, piano inspired by the death of his father. They are closer in format and spirit to austere church music than to folk music. 2 is particularly haunting, sounding like an electronic version of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name. The more formal 4 approaches the austerity of a chamber lied. Most are serene, celestial chants like 3 and 8, that don't seem to have much else to say than to respect the will of nature. It was a very minor work, but one that already showed Panda Bear's eccentric take on singing and songwriting.

Terrestrial Tones is a project of abstract electronica by Avey Tare (David Portner) and Black Dice's Eric Copeland that debuted with Blasted (Psychopath, 2004), followed by Oboroed / Circus Lives (2005), containing the ridiculously long Oboroed (31:00) and Circus Lives (20:27), and Dead Drunk (2006), albums of abrasive and chaotic soundscapes.

The four-song EP Prospect Hummer (Fat Cat, 2005) documents a collaboration between Animal Collective and Vashti Bunyan.

Jane, a collaboration between Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox and Scott Mou, released Berserker (Paw Tracks, 2005), a rather confused collection of aimless songs.

Feels (Fat Cat, 2005), featuring guests of honor such as violinist Eyvind Kang and Kristin Anna Valtysdottir Mum's pianist, was Animal Collective's most accessible album yet, the equivalent of Sonic Youth's Sister (1987), a complete repudiation of the aesthetics of Here Comes The Indian. The collective's innovation shifted from the accumulation of childish musical errors to a new canon of musical counterpoint. The most cohesive songs (such as Did You See The Words, Turn Into Something and The Purple Bottle) evoked the Flaming Lips at their most harmonically insolvent. The irresistible dance Grass virtually coined a new form of Sixties Revival, retaining the jovial spirit and hinting at soulfulness while eskewing all the previously codified stereotypes. The separation of Avey Tare's songs on the first half and Panda Bear's on the second did not bode well for the future, though.
The sweet lullaby Loch Raven and the charmingly mutant Banshee Beat (the longest track at eight minutes) applied the Animal Collective's transgressive opportunism to a much more compromising folk or pop context. Only Daffy Duck harked back to the celestial mess of the past. Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of its limitations, this was the album that influenced the chillwave genre.

I'm Not / Comfy In Nautica (Uunited Acoustic Recordings, 2006) was a single released by Panda Bear (Noah Lennox).

Animal Collective's Avey Tare and his wife Mum's Kria Brekkan recorded a duo album, Pullhair Rubeye (Paw Tracks, 2007), of ethereal lo-fi psychedelic lullabies. The notable event was not so much the album itself as the fact that the main version played all the music backwards.

Hollinndagain (Paw Tracks, 2006) collects live performances from 2001.

Panda Bear's Person Pitch (Paw Tracks, 2007) performs a spectacular deconstruction of pop and folk music. The vocal harmonies recall the Beach Boys, the melodies evoke cheesy bubblegum acts such as 10 CC. Comfy In Nautica a-cappella children's hymn with loud rhythmic clapping amid assorted electronic effects. The spaced-out vocals, the multi-part harmonies, the cascading melody of Take Pills sound positively like harkening from the psychedelic Sixties, but the song is typical of how the rhythms, whose effect is often enhanced by loops, transport Panda Bear's ditties into another orbit and another planet. Panda Bear weaves singalongs that ride layers of humble arrangements according to an ancestral logic of tribal repetition and jovial self-parody.
Sometimes his music sounds like folk-rock in the hands of a primitive tribe, as in the hypnotic, epic 12-minute Bros, sung with an attitude that sits halfway between Brazialian saudade and a stoned hippy's nonchalance (the vocals are distorted and reverbed) while the jingling percussion gets more and more intense. (The next song, I'm Not, sounds like an appendix focusing mostly on loops of dreamy vocals without the rhythm).
Moments of percussive trance and ecstatic singing also surface from the melodic crevices of the 13-minute Good Girl/Carrots, that replaces the collective hammering of Bros with dissonant industrial loops and beeps and hisses. The singing here is a mere corollary to the grotesque soundscape. (And, again, the orgy is followed by a piece of floating free-form vocals).
Panda Bear has installed a giant mirror in the sky to project Earth's life onto another galaxy.

Having suddenly become darlings of the critics that had ignored them at the beginning, Animal Collective delivered a wild-mannered album, Strawberry Jam (Domino, 2007), to satisfy the late-comers and to start testing the masses. Overall, Avey Tare's artistic soul seems to prevail over Panda Bear's (despite the fact that Panda Bear is credited with writing most of the material). If occasionally Tare achieves prophetic greatness (the pounding and relatively catchy For Reverend Green), if the album still exhibits a rhythmic madness (that mainly manifests itself in the off-kilter grooves of Peacebone, facile and noisy at the same time), the creative peaks are found at the other stylistic extreme, in the bubbling, demented, childishly martial Unsolved Mysteries, in the electronic-heavy mantra-like Fireworks #1, in the anarchic, dadaistic chamber music of Cuckoo Cuckoo. More melodic madness occurs in the quirky Polynesian-tinged chant Chores, in the frenzied music-hall skit Winter Wonderland, and especially in the deranged ode of Derek, that is swallowed in a monster cave of electronic sounds.

The EP Water Curses (Domino, 2008) contains Avey Tare's catchy title-track.

The Animal Collective was pared down to a trio now after the departure of Josh "Deakin" Dibb. Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009) continued the trend towards a more conventional (and guitar-less) song format, packaged in a sleek, multi-layered production. The Syd Barrett-ian psychedelic lullaby In The Flowers explodes in a loud merry-go-round of keyboards and percussion: it is neither groundbreaking nor particularly memorable. My Girls is a charming take on minimalist repetition and house music, with raga-like fibrillation juxtaposed against ecstatic chants: neither particularly new nor particularly engaging. Lion in a Coma is an atmospheric and not very melodic song although drenched in a chaos of syncopated percussive sounds and of somewhat clownish electronic timbres. The album dwells in this limbo of fake uncreative creativity. Basically, it's nothing but Phil Spector's "wall of sound" updated to the age in which the studio can do a lot more than an army of musicians. Also Frightened wonders dangerously close to the Beatles of Sgt Pepper, and Bluish sounds like a parody of the Beach Boys. The Animal Collective's personal variation on that stereotype comes from the ritualistic element that is also the common denominator of all the songs.
The one moment of genius is Summertime Clothes, boasting a dislocated hard-rock riff and a panzer techno beat as its rhythmic foundation, and a vaudeville-like rigmarole with a soaring chorus as its leitmotiv. A close second is the jovial Latin-tingued dance of Brothersport that turns into a hypnotic game of vocal harmonies.
Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) have never sounded more conventional. They have even become predictable. Only the bands of synth-pop have employed so many keyboard sounds to create such simple pop ditties.

The Animal Collective also scored the soundtrack for the 53-minute psychedelic video ODDSAC (2010) by Danny Perez, and Geologist scored the soundtrack for Coral Morphologic's short film Man o War (2011).

Avey Tare's Down There (2010) channels his haunting gloomy personal visions into melodies for manipulated vocals and watery electronica. The songs are difficult to grasp and catalog, drifting between ambient folk (Ghost of Books) and philosophical pop (Cemeteries), and only occasionally standing up erect (the single Lucky 1).

Panda Bear's Tomboy (Paw Tracks, 2011) is a collection of much more predictable (and shorter) songs. The booming You Can Count On Me and the lively Surfer's Hymn are more closely related to his past work, while Friendship Bracelet and Slow Motion indulge in psychological soundpainting, and Alsatian Darn, Scheherazade and Benfica explore alternative ways to compose a song. The problem is that, with a humbler arsenal at his disposal, Panda Bear sometimes ends up sounding like a parody: Afterburner echoes synth-pop of the 1980s and Last Night at the Jetty even doo-wop of the 1950s.

The Animal Collective (now again a foursome after the return of Josh Dibb aka "Deakin"), continued its slow descent into irrelevance with Centipede Hz (Domino, 2012). The cluttered arrangements are cunningly designed to hide the lack of imagination. It's a strategy of distraction (architected by the same producer, Ben Allen, who fooled the masses on Merriweather Post Pavilion). That strategy is wrapped a concept of sort: the album is ostensibly inspired by radio interference, which therefore constitutes the primal trick used in the sound production.
Opener Moonjock is emblematic of the state of the band: a third-rate Beatles melody, third-rate Beach Boys harmonies and third-rate sound effects, a deadly combination salvaged towards the end by an honest burst of tribal joviality. When the chaotic arrangements relent, the scarce substance of the music is mercilessly revealed, e.g. in terribly trivial songs like Today's Supernatural and Wide Eyed. Where they found the guts to insert things (let's not call them "song") like FatherTime and New Town Burnout will remain a mystery. Panda Bear should blush for how he wastes Rosie Oh: his singing style has become a major annoyance. The faked exuberance of the album is a major drawback even on the few valid songs, ruining even the melodic progression and rhythmic invention of Applesauce, the hysterical Talking Heads-ian jamming of Monkey Riches and the exotic Japan-esque techno-rock of Amanita. The best one can say is that this album is a polyrhythmic feast. But one can't help wonder whether this wasn't simply meant as a joke on us.

Avey Tare, Angel Deradoorian (formerly of the Dirty Projectors) and Jeremy Hyman (formerly of Ponytail) recorded Enter the Slasher House (2014), credited to Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks. The songs mostly sound like leftovers from the Centipede Hz sessions.

Panda Bear's double-LP Meets the Grim Reaper (Domino, 2015) contains some of his career's best moments: the rhythmic collage of Boys Latin, the morphing of musique concrete into a jovial singalong in Mr Noah, the upbeat and catchy disco shuffle Come to your Senses (one of his most user-friendly songs ever). However, opener Sequential Circuits, the dreamy Tropic Of Cancer, Principe Real (that sounds like a parody of synth-pop), and the final singalong Acid Wash are emblematic of how most of the album's melodies sound tired and the arrangements trivial.

The trio of Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist resurrected for another disappointing album, Painting With (2016). The childish electronica of Lying on the Grass and the robotic rockabilly On Delay sound like unfinished songs. Sometimes the trio sounds like a syncopated version of the New Kids on the Block (Golden Gal) and sometimes they seem to offer different variations on the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. The bombastic production cannot redeem these scruffy compositions. The disorienting vocal polyphony of FloriDada and Recycling is too little to justify the existence of the album. The album was followed by the equally disappointing four-song EP Painters (2017).

Then it was Deakin's turn to debut solo with Sleep Cycle (2016). His songs are longer and more meticulously assembled, despite a humbler bedroom-style production. Especially original is the insanely dissonant Footy. Unfortunately half of the songs are disposable. Nonetheless, it was possibly the best of the solo albums since Panda Bear's Tomboy.

Avey Tare's second solo album Eucalyptus (2017) is a patience-testing experience. Way too long for what Avey Tare has to say, it wastes a lot of time assembling found sounds and random instrumental non-sequiturs. One has to wait until the sixth song, Jackson 5, to hear something that resembles a finished composition. Most of the rest borders the audio collage and the stream of consciousness, attaining a peak of pathos with the time dilation of Selection of a Place. This could have been a three-song EP, including the twisted eight-minute ecological ode Coral Lords.

Avey Tare's third solo album Cows on Hourglass Pond (2019) opens with an acid litany over a minimal techno beat, What's the Goodside, and features a variety of entertaining eccentricities: the galloping Western-movie tinged Saturdays, the trotting and symphonic K.C. Yours, and the atmospheric ballad HORS_. The best moments exude a general feeling of early Pink Floyd. Unfortunately, the album is dragged down by an impressive amount of filler.

Avey Tare and Geologist recorded live in the Amazon Rainforest the five-song EP Meeting of the Waters (2017); and then Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin scored the ambient soundtrack for the video Tangerine Reef (2018), a collaboration with Coral Morphologic (marine biologist Colin Foord and composer J.D. McKay).

Panda Bear's Buoys (Domino, 2019) was not only uninspired: it was also sloppy. Even songs like Inner Monologue that could have been intriguing were left unfinished.

The members of Animal Collective seemed on a mission to destroy their own reputation.

Hollinndagain (2002), Animal Crack Box (2009), Live at 9:30 (2015) and Ballet Slippers (2019) document live performances of the Animal Collective.

It takes a lot of patience to go through the EP Bridge to Quiet (2020). One song, though, is worthy to be included in their canon: Piggy Knows, although it takes forever to get started, a cross between early Pink Floyd, an Indian raga and a pow-wow dance.

Time Skiffs (2022), Animal Collective's first album in a decade featuring all four core members, contains We Go Back and Often this is harmless background muzak concocted by injecting lazy elements of exotica in trivial pop litanies (the embarrassing opener Dragon Slayer, the even more embarrassing Walker). The eight-minute Cherokee almost rescues this inane exotica thanks to an accelerated ska rhythm and pulsing Tangerine Dream-esque electronica, but the repetition stretches out for way too long. This feeling of exotic vacation extends all the way to the languid, slow-motion, Fleet Foxes-esque soul ballad Royal and Desire that closes the album. Vague echoes of their heavy-layered psychedelia can be found in the coda of Car Keys (if one skips the song itself) and in the lush vocal harmonies of Prester John (but the song is way too repetitive and ends with a childish sound collage). Maybe the real highlight is a diligent imitation of bubblegum-pop of the 1960s and Brit-pop of the 1990s: Strung With Everything.

Panda Bear collaborated with Sonic Boom (E.A.R.) for Reset (2022), which sounds like an uncredited tribute to the 1950s-60s. Panda Bear's solo Sinister Grift (Domino, 2025) supermarket muzak of the lowest quality, a painful imitation of Brian Wilson that descends into beach reggae-pop (Just As Well and Ferry Lady) and briefly enters a psychedelic orbit (Left In The Cold) before landing as a pensive bard (the folkish elegy Elegy For Noah Lou). Hard to believe that this man used to be a creative musician.