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NEW YORK – They’ve been called weirdoes, freaks and Satanists.
Animal Collective’s otherworldly song structures, deconstructed harmonies and tribal rhythms aren’t always met with receptive ears, but there might not be a more progressive band in indie music.
With two of the best-reviewed albums of the year – the band’s new “Strawberry Jam” and the solo disc by keyboardist Panda Bear, “Person Pitch” – Animal Collective has established itself as an act wildly separate from other retro-oriented bands.
The sound of the future, the psychedelic band acknowledges, is something they seek.
“That’s kind of always been a goal, to do something that we feel is missing,” says Dave Portner, who goes by the name Avey Tare and is the closest thing Animal Collective has to a lead singer.
“Even when we were younger, when we first started recording, it was real important to us,” Portner adds. “There was just something lacking for us in the music during the late ’90s and what was around us. We really wanted something that was new, something that wasn’t there.”
Animal Collective is a group of four 20something musicians, all of whom have pseudonyms: Portner, keyboardist and sometimes drummer Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), electronic programmer Brian Weitz (Geologist) and guitarist Josh Dibb (Deakin).
At the center of Animal Collective is the songwriting and singing duo of Lennox and Portner.
Lennox brings ethereal, reverb-drenched falsetto to the mix. “Person Pitch,” his third but easily most-noticed solo disc, showed what Lennox sounds like without his writing partner. His warm melodies – brought to culmination on the transcendent single “Bros” – recall a kind of fractured Beach Boys.
Portner’s voice is more dynamic than Lennox’s, and often jumps unpredictably from anthemic harmony to screeches and snarls.
Weitz fills in the sonic textures with loops, samples and various electronica. “Strawberry Jam” was envisioned as an alien landscape.
“We wanted to sound futuristic,” Weitz says.
All four grew up in Baltimore, where Portner recalls playing makeshift shows in the worst parts of town because there wasn’t a professional venue for indie or punk bands.
“Just an open mind and a love of music is what we all had,” Weitz says of their early bond.
They began as a group in earnest around 2000. Their first three studio albums were small releases that drew little notice, which Weitz believes helped incubate their experimental approach.
“Sung Tongs,” released in 2004, was Animal Collective’s breakthrough and it landed on many top 10 lists for the year, including The New York Times’. The disc featured Portner and Lennox’s skill at making old instruments sound new. On “Sung Tongs,” acoustic guitars dominate, most notably on the single “Who Could Win a Rabbit,” where even just the hand-clapping bridge (if you can call it that) seemed radically new.
As if shedding skin, those instruments were soon largely abandoned for others that would force new approaches. In 2005, the band released “Feels” to general acclaim, but the more simple, stripped-down “Strawberry Jam” has further increased their audience.
Animal Collective is already off in a new direction, playing songs of a yet another new variety in concert. The band sounds still unsure of how to describe the latest evolution, but says it’s another step in trying to make electronic sounds organic.
“I’d like to think that we can always do something better,” says Lennox. “The moment where we’re like ‘That’s the best we got,’ I feel like we’re kind of dead at that point.”
