Animal Collective @ the 9:30 Club
The mood was quite different the last time I saw Animal Collective. It was the summer of 2004, and the band had just released their breakthrough LP, Sung Tongs. Of the 100 or so folks who showed up to see the band play in the basement of a university building that night, I would wager that most, if not all of them had heard Sung Tongs and were eager to see how the songs would be rendered live. The members of Animal Collective, however, had their own plans. In what has since become a hallmark of Animal Collective's live sets, the band decided to eschew album tracks in favor of a series of works in progress, most of which took the form of protracted, improvised drone experiments. This, of course, made the crowd anxious and the band, determined to stand their ground, reacted with contempt. The end result was a tense, confrontational vibe--it felt as if the band was playing against, rather than for the audience.
Fast-forward five years and it's clear that Animal Collective has learned a thing or two while on the road. It helps, of course, that the band's latest, Merriweather Post Pavilion, veers far more toward pop territory. Taking their cues from house music, the band writes songs that are as rewarding as they are challenging, full of big, bright melodies, straightforward rhythms and undeniable hooks. And just as releasing an accessible album eventually became the most unpredictable and therefore, logical move the band could make, touring on that album in earnest became similarly inevitable.
Of course, everything is relative when it comes to Animal Collective, so when the band announced their intentions to play songs from Merriweather Post Pavilion live, no one quite expected them to play it straight. As those in attendance found out on Monday night, however, the band seems to have finally found a middle ground between pretension and predictability. Though they largely stuck to album cuts during their nearly two hour-long set, the trio bent and stretched familiar songs into unfamiliar shapes, allowing melodies to dovetail, bleed together and reverberate throughout the club. Make no mistake: Animal Collective is still a band that plays for the dude in the back of the club, not the kids in the front row. And while this sometimes engenders tedium (admittedly, the show's middle section dragged, with many in attendance letting out yawns and fidgeting with phones), the results can be breathtaking. Take the band's rendition of Panda Bear's "Comfy in Nautica," which flirted with drone without surrendering the immediacy of its echoing surf rock vocal harmonies. Or "Who Could Win a Rabbit," which sounded like a tambourine-heavy, club-friendly remix of the Sung Tongs highlight.
The most enthusiastic reactions, however, were reserved for the Merriweather tracks, and deservedly so. The crowd absolutely lost it when the shimmering arpeggios of "My Girls" were loosed, singing along with the song's call-and-response vocals and hopping up and down in time with the relaxed tempo. And during the encore, amid the densely-layered melodies, echoing yelps and massive beat of "Brother Sport," the audience seemed to collectively forget that this was, ostensibly, an indie rock show. Hands were thrown in the air. Projections raced across the surface of a giant balloon. Lights onstage flashed in accordance with the low-end. And up front, a fan waved around a glow-stick unabashedly. "It looks like a rave," someone in the back of the room said discreetly. I don't know about you, but I'll take 1,200 dancing fans over a hundred with their hands in their pockets any day.
An archived stream of the show is available at the NPR Music site