Man Stops Traffic at 17th and K to Demand $200 Million
Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
Judge Throws Out WTU Suit Over Teacher Layoffs
Vegetate to Close at the End of the Month
Morning Roundup: Rain Won't Go Away Edition
The band members placed their gear on top of translucent tables that were lit from inside, lending an ethereal feel to the stage setup. (Mehan Jayasuriya)
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
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
I like the album, and enjoy a lot of their work, but I just have no desire whatsoever to see them live.
This post wins the prize for Most Usage of Words You're Likely to See on the SAT. Well executed.
The opposite of predictable is not, by default, pretension. What's the appeal of seeing a performance that mimics a recorded product?
I dunno Animal Collective from Elvis Presley, but it sounds like I'd have dug that basement show one helluva lot better than watching a well-lit human jukebox at the 9:30. Life (and music, particularly) can be a nice ride off-script.
i dunno man, their old stuff is so drony and boring. Maybe if u do a lot of drugs...
I love the band, but wasn't a fan of the show. Way too slow and zoned out for me. I also thought the sound system sounded pretty bad.
The 9:30 must have changed its sound system recently. I was at the PB&J show last week and the bass was ridiculously loud. Unbearable really.
I dunno DE, I saw PB&J at 930 a year ago and I thought they sounded crummy then too.
I didn't even know they played "Who Could Win a Rabbit" until I read this. And I was there. Did they change it that dramatically, am I an idiot, or was it just a case of too many Dogfish Heads? Or all three? Or did you just confuse "Who Could Win A Rabbit" with "Slippi?"
Also, both a cougar AND a dude tried hitting on me (independently!) during the last minute of "My Girls" (a particularly enjoyable minute of a particularly enjoyable song). They were both in a cluster of fortysomethings who all had no idea what the hell was going on, other than the fact that they were standing next to a bar that dispensed alcoholic beverages that they could use an excuse to awkwardly grind on each other and annoy other concertgoers.
Nevermind, I'm an idiot, they played it right before Brother Sport. Yeah, it was probably the beer's fault.
I've been a big fan of all of their albums since long before MPP, and I have to admit I was a little disappointed after seeing them live for the first time on Monday. Many other diehards may disagree, but I though they took some frenetic, energetic, awesome songs like "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "Fireworks", and figured out a way to suck those positive qualities out of them and somehow make them sort of dull. I don't need to hear exact album cuts, but I'd just have preferred if they maybe added energy to the upbeat songs rather than stripped them down live.
The show certainly had it's moments, like "Brother Sport" and "Comfy in Nautica". But many of the songs were so drastically altered that they were barely distinuishable. I prefer the album versions of most of the songs to 12 mintues of very slow electronic noodling interspersed with brief moments throughout the song where you recognize it as as a song you actually really like.
@Banshee, well said--I couldn't agree more. I'm all for deconstructing songs and jamming and what not, but I just wasn't feeling what they were doing. I was pretty disappointed.
Depending on who I'd talked to before seeing them on the Strawberry Jam tour, Animal Collective would either be the best or the worst show I would ever see. The 9:30 Club show (as well as the show I saw off of the SJ tour) seem to make the argument that it's both...flashes of utter brilliance and moments of watch-checking and wondering just how that show down the street was going. So, I'm right with Mehan on this one.
I will also say that the Ottobar show the previous night provided the sort of euphoria that I probably won't experience again for a long time and almost certainly won't experience again this year. Just...wow.