Going to an Animal Collective show is like trying to look at something at the bottom of a body of water. It's frustrating at times, surprising at others and sometimes it just hurts your eyes. Or, in this case, your ears.
Tuesday night at the Black Cat, the band played songs from their most recent records, 2004's "Sung Tongs" and last year's "Feels," which some Eagle writers included in their Top Five of '05 album lists. It seems like the band comes through every chance they get, having grown up in suburban Maryland. Rumor has it they were jerks in high school. FYI.
On record, Animal Collective is almost accessible, almost poppy. The guitars are jangly, the choruses bubbly and alive. Their much-lauded efforts have touched on everything from straight campfire folk to electronic experimental noise. Lead singer Panda Bear crafts otherworldly vocal melodies, beautiful and foreign. Indeed, much of the Collective's music is in some way otherworldly, ignoring basic song structures and rules of melody. And even there, some songs are almost buried in background noise, but just exposed enough to be a challenge for the listener, a little game of "find the pop song."
There's something to be said for that, but back to the water simile.
The band's live shows are like trying to see through fog or stare at something through water. At times, the water is thick and pasty, totally obscuring the little nuggets of familiarity deep down. At other times, the water clears up and allows the object to be seen in a different light. The performance of "Grass," a highlight of "Feels," was like that. Liberties were taken, samples were added, guitars - as they were for most of the show - were almost inaudible. But the song was there, rippling clearly under the water. At some moments during the over two hour performance, the waters almost parted, exposing a song for a few fleeting moments.
But most of the show was covered in the aforementioned thickness. The band sort of pranced and jogged in place, making samples of their voices and turning knobs to distort and muddle the soundscape.
Nine-piece Icelandic orchestra Storsveit Nix Noltes opened the show. The band included accordion, cello, a fellow who switched between euphonium and Sousaphone (much as if they brought a Sousaphone simply to make people say, "Holy shit, a Sousaphone!"), a banjo and legions of guitars. They sounded like Godspeed! You Black Emperor if that band played Klezmer music, no joke. They almost lost the audience completely a few times, as they changed time signatures way too often to do any dancing and they had a few lousy noise breakdowns (a la Godspeed!, but lamer), but they'd always somehow bring them back. And their short and cute broken English thank-yous were way too cute.
Animal Collective was the type of show where one wouldn't really be surprised to see a 50-year-old man in a sweater vest reading a tattered copy of Borges or something. Animal Collective has been embraced by the NPR generation of literary middle-agers, but if they came to see a folk show, they left disappointed and with ringing ears.
