Animal Collective 'Fall Be Kind' (Domino) Released 23/11/09

Let’s cut the clichéd expressions some slack. There are very few times when you can bring out the “…and look at you now!“, pre/post-makeover shot from not-much-of-a-looker to hubba-hubba-God-bless-Rimmel-London, but now’s one of them. Animal Collective started 2009 as a cult band, celebrated by the majority of their listeners who knew their beloved were on the fringe of something much greater. And alas, here they are now, rounding off a year of critical acclaim and tolerance of the word “hype”, certified as a band who polarize opinion. Now, everyone has something to say about Animal Collective.

And now for something completely different.
The trio were accused of streamlining their music on ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion‘, creating pop songs (”heaven forbid!”) and selfishly waving goodbye to the experimenting guts that defined the band in the past. Here, we witness a return to methods of old on ‘Fall Be Kind‘, a merging of the glossy, velvet tongue from the latest album with a more tasteful knack for variety and alternatives, such as that found on ‘Feels‘.

EP’s are very often a means of re-assuring a group of fans who might have felt let down by a previous release. ‘Fall Be Kind’ does seem to attempt that, not least achieve that, only offering three minutes of rich, succinct pop in the climax of ‘What Would I Want? Sky‘. That may be the finest three minutes the band have recorded to date; Avey Tare’s vocals float on its back above the Grateful Dead samples and the bells and the cries – the line “I should be floating but I’m weighted by thinking” encompassing what Animal Collective always have been and always will be about.

But the rest of this collection of songs tilts its head towards elongation and the switching of one mood to another. Take ‘Graze’ as the perfect example: the opener breathes warm synthetic air around you for the first half before erupting into a, brace yourself, pan-flute solo. And yes, it might be the best (the only) pan-flute solo recorded in history but most importantly it shows the group succumbing to their ways of old whilst completely re-inventing their scope of sound at the same time.

‘Fall Be Kind’ still makes every effort of keeping its two feet in the headscape of ‘Merriweather…’. The theme of daily life, routine, normality that defined January’s album resounds in ‘On A Highway’. Exposing perhaps Avey Tare’s most personal batch of lyrics to date, telling the tale of a band touring, becoming anxious, sleepy. He talks of letting “some hash relax me” and his envy of “Noah’s dreaming”. It’s a removal from the natural/nautical imagery that seems to creep into every one of the band’s rhyming couplets. A very exclusive tale of coping with monotony.

And quite significantly this shows Animal Collective continuing to break the doors down, to evolve into something they never thought themselves capable of a few years back. The decade has been theirs in which to progress forward from leftfield acoustic-bred lullabies to glossy displays of summer-pop. Realistically, you can only expect them to continue to do the same. And of course, await the clichéd expression (every review of this EP should have one); ‘Fall Be Kind‘ rounds off the year of their lives on an absolute high.