Our Band Could Be Our Life: Adding Up Animal Collective's Parts

Words: Jesse Ashlock

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Bands hijack themselves easily. Even good ones. They fall prey to internecine disputes, become subjugated by a single dominant personality, get stage-managed to death, or worse. That's one reason so many tease us with greatness, then disappear or turn into caricatures of themselves. It's a fate Animal Collective has always hoped to avoid -- so much so that they've never been comfortable even thinking of themselves as a band. "We're into egoless music," explains Brian Weitz, aka Geologist. That philosophy led the group to wear masks during some early performances, then scrap them as soon as the move started to feel like a gimmick.

Seated along three sides of a long table in the soothingly dark and quiet, early-a.m. recesses of a conference room, the four native Marylanders seem a little out of their element; the milieu feels far removed from the hypnotic, spontaneous energy of their live shows, or the unpredictable and organic eclecticism of their records, or the bucolic vibe of the farmland outside Baltimore where they used to drive around listening to music as teenagers. They're a bit weary after three days of nonstop press, and a little beat up from an unusually demanding photo shoot (not for this magazine). Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, fights off yawns. He's in New York from Lisbon, where he lives with his wife. The other three are at least in a familiar time zone -- Weitz lives in DC, while Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) and Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) are both Brooklyn-based. All share a loose style of speech, often circling around an idea until they get it just right, and have a way of elaborating on one another's observations that drives home just how long they've known each other.

The friendships started in high school (and in some cases before), but then, as now, they were driven by a shared love of music, not an overwhelming desire to be in a band. "It was always like, who feels like playing tonight?" says Weitz. Adds Portner, "A lot of people start a band with the intention of starting a band. That's the foundation of the relationship, like, 'let's keep together and push the band forward.' We started as friends, so it's kind of important that we remain friends." In fact, the "band" didn't exist as a formal entity until 2003, when Animal Collective released Here Comes the Indian (on the band's Paw Tracks imprint, a sub-label of Carpark Records), a wild, sometimes uncomfortable collision of atmospheric melodicism and harsh electronics-treated rhythmic dissonance that was the first album all four friends had actually played on together. Their new one, Feels (Fat Cat), an enchanted arc of jauntily twisted experimental pop songs and spacey ambient drift-music, is only the second full-length to feature full band personnel. But there are numerous other releases that can be classified under the Animal Collective rubric, most of which feel as radically distinct as Indian and Feels.

Early on, the idea was to have a label, which they dubbed Animal, expressly for the purpose of re-leasing their own work, whether created individually or in twos, threes and fours. The nicknames were part of the deal, a way to emphasize that, as Portner explains, "We all came into making our own music on our own and we wanted to keep that element." The label's only release was Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, recorded in 2000 and credited to Avey Tare and Panda Bear. But the idea eventually morphed into Animal Collective itself. So last year's widely praised Sung Tongs was an Animal Collective release, even though it was created by the same duo and feels like a natural extension of the work begun on Spirit They're Gone in its unfettered celebration of childish joy and impressionistic sonic layering of folky instrumentation and environmental sounds.

Therefore it's tricky trying to characterize Animal Collective's music any one way. Campfire Songs, a formless, droning front porch record created in 2003 by Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist, belies the musical structure and creative production techniques of other albums with its lo-fi acoustic simmer and hiss, while the twitchy cut-up cacophony of Danse Manatee, recorded by the same trio two years earlier, seems to fly in the face of Campfire Songs or catchier, more "song-based" recent albums like Sung Tongs and Feels. The group's approach allows them to break down many of the polarities we've come to expect in modern music -- rock versus electronic, stripped down versus produced, abrasive versus accessible, and especially, traditional versus experimental. Portner mentions Sun City Girls, contemporary classical and musique concrète in one breath, Kylie Minogue, Michael Jackson and the Beatles in the next. It's not an either/or proposition; all that stuff has inspired the group at various times, along with Pavement, horror movie soundtracks and minimal techno. "We always talk about it," Dibb comments. "I think those noisier, more fucked-up records, they're really melodic. I feel like it's all there. The way it's approached is, I suppose, a little different. But to me, the quote-unquote pop stuff people are saying that we do now doesn't feel like a new element. Maybe it's just a new way of having come about finding it."

But if there's a thread that runs through all the group's music, it probably begins with the name "Animal." When they chose it for the label, they were certainly thinking about the way they wanted to perform and record music. "We were talking about energy," Dibb recalls. "We were talking in terms of animal behavior, and things [that] are less cognitive, 'I'm thinking this through to the end,' and more just about being in the moment and experiencing and being open and vulnerable to your instincts."

It's not surprising then that Animal Collective is so often associated with nature. The association isn't something the group's members discourage, with their rapturous talk of Maryland's woods and fields and their memories of formative years spent listening to music out of doors. It's in the music too, both in its images -- see Campfire Songs, or "Leaf House," on Sung Tongs, or "Grass," on Feels -- and in its occasional field recordings and messy, organic, ephemeral shapes. But while the group isn't shy about its crunchiness (and Weitz does work in environmental policy), they're not about tree-hugging dogma. Nature is just one part of their world. What the group enjoys about consuming and creating music, Dibb explains, is "experiencing how it transplants images and colors onto the actual place where you are. I think that can happen regardless of whether it's the forest or Fifth Avenue."

The group isn't so much trying to tap into the out-of-doors nature as it's trying to get at its own nature, which is also messy and organic and ephemeral. An album like Danse Manatee was a response, Portner says, to having moved to New York at the beginning of the century, feeling frustrated with independent music, hearing bands like Black Dice and Lightning Bolt play, and thinking, "Here's something new and exciting and abrasive, a new feeling, a new energy." Here Comes the Indian was about the band "feeling kind of crappy and not getting along very well." Campfire Songs was a trip home to Maryland. Similarly, live shows are distinct products of the moments and environments where they're happening, and the songs might differ wildly from their recorded forms. The band believes strongly in getting out of the way of its music, and letting it be what it wants to be.

"Our music has that feeling," says Portner, "because of the joy and excitement we have, and the freedom we have, and I think that's how you should approach music. Like, if you want to call out or scream out whenever you feel like it, you should." Those whoops and hollers and wordless, soaring melodies crop up on the recordings too, and they're one reason Animal Collective has been compared to the Beach Boys, another group whose music was seen as being both childlike and spiritual. As sophisticated as Animal Collective's songs can be from a compositional and production standpoint, there's also a sense that, like gospel music or primal scream therapy, they're an attempt to get at something preverbal, that can't be expressed with language, only with sound.

That gloss helps explain the group's Prospect Hummer EP, recorded in London early last year and released early this year. It's a collaboration with Vashti Bunyan, the lovely, lonely lady of '60s British folk music who released just one record -- 1970's spare, pristine Just Another Diamond Day -- before disappearing into rural seclusion, only to be rescued recently by admirers like Devendra Banhart (now 60, she just released her second album, Lookaftering). At first glance, the pairing of the obscure English folk doyenne with the restless young Maryland experimentalists might seem unlikely, but their three days together in London produced a modest jewel. After meeting Bunyan through Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, the band brought leftover material from the Sung Tongs sessions, full of pastoral textures that complemented the elemental directness of Bunyan's voice. The finished songs (three of them, with a fourth instrumental created by the Geologist, who couldn't make the session) reveal kindred spirits, a group and a singer from different generations but equally as focused on music as a pathway to the heart. Lennox marvels at the effortlessness of the collaboration, while Portner calls it "a magic or lucky thing."

Feels offers more of the "quote-unquote pop stuff" the band pursued on Sung Tongs in its carefully considered compositional structures and accessible melodies. But emotionally the album is another departure. For Portner, it's "more aware and mature," and more a product of "an adult approach to life." It also feels like Animal Collective's most romantic effort, and not romantic like Sung Tongs' celebration of youthful exuberance, but romantic in the sense of celebrating grown-up -- or at least more grown-up -- interactions and affections. Animal Collective's lyrics are often difficult to discern, but the opening quartet of more structured songs throws out images that attest to the wondrously complex push and pull of relationships -- "Sometimes I'm naked, and thank God sometimes you?re naked," Avey Tare intones over a tumbling piano and insistent drumbeat on "The Purple Bottle." Then the waterfall ripple of an autoharp opens "Bees," echoing the Prospect Hummer EP and signaling the start of a more introspective and amorphous set of songs marked by gently swelling guitars, voices used almost purely as instruments, simple piano figures and delicate electronics -- before the closing "Turn into Something" returns to the upbeat mood of the album's earlier songs. Feels is like the perfect date and its aftermath: it starts out playful and communicative, with songs that are both antic and tender, before dissolving into a period of euphoric reflection, then finishing with the giddiness of the next morning.

It takes some figuring out, but eventually you realize that Animal Collective's music is about lives on display, in the best and truest sense of the phrase. That's the point for the group, and one gets the impression that if it turned into something else, they wouldn't be doing it (they all have other interests). "We never wanted this to be a career," Portner says. "This is something we like doing." But as things stand, they've found a surprisingly successful way just to be the four guys they are. "It's very important that we have our hands in everything that we present to people," says Weitz, "so it's a personal thing that came from us." This extends to their freedom to control the visual face of the band -- Portner created the whimsical Darger-esque collage that decorates Feels' cover -- and the Paw Tracks label, which has allowed them to release not only Indian, but also Panda Bear's solo work and albums by Ariel Pink, the warped, lo-fi, Spector they discovered on tour in LA, among others.

Animal Collective's albums -- and their approach to making albums -- feel unique, and distinctly of the here and now. But their ethos recalls the seminal '80s American underground bands profiled in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life -- bands like Sonic Youth, Beat Happening, Fugazi and Dinosaur Jr. These are not the kinds of bands to whom Animal Collective gets compared a lot, but they also placed a premium on DIY values and personal authenticity above all else. It's an attitude Animal Collective believes is making a comeback. "I think people are moving more and more towards trying to make stuff -- whether it's music or visual art or installation pieces -- that's really attempting to get people to feel like it's more than just lines on a wall, or just a song," Dibb says. "[They're] trying to get people to have a visceral experience in the thing they're doing."

Portner continues the thought. "You're more aware that there's a person involved. There's a realness in what's there. There's an intention of no matter how weird it might be, or totally straight, or whatever, here are people doing exactly what they want to do."