Animal Collective is a group of musical experimentalists who, since their inception in 2000, have never lost sight of the fun inherent in bending genre conventions. This four-person (temporarily whittled down to three-person) band approaches avant-garde indie pop not as a formal artistic task, but as children playing with the toys they love best—which in their case are indie pop, freak folk, tribal rhythms and Beach Boys-styled harmonies. This is a group so musically adept that they can significantly alter their sonic palate without losing their identities. Yet they are not chameleons: It's not that they change their character with each new release, they simply turn their concerns toward a different but equally fulfilling corner of their idiosyncratic world of pop.
In their formative years, the Baltimore-based group of friends released several albums not explicitly attributed to Animal Collective but nevertheless counted as canonical AC by many fans. Their first few efforts were credited to the whimsical aliases of each member—for instance, their first record, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, is credited to Avey Tare and Panda Bear. It wasn't until 2003's Here Comes the Indian that they started going formally by Animal Collective.
By the mid-2000s people had started taking notice of Animal Collective's marriage of psych-folk and organic, layered harmonies. Their pitch-perfect vocal interplay (and often indiscernible lyrics) suggests the Beach Boys sitting around a campfire slightly soused and casually harmonizing with each other for the pure joy of music (hell, these guys even have an album called Campfire Songs, suggesting they're fully aware of the impression they leave with the listener). For instance, the 12-minute ""Visiting Friends"" on 2004's Sung Tongs finds the group indulging in some acoustic guitar noodling with looped backward voices that bring to mind what Necronomicon from ""The Evil Dead"" might sound like on a lazy Sunday.
The 2005 record Feels was in many ways AC's breakthrough album, transforming them from an acclaimed fringe band to a group critics could no longer ignore without seeming totally out of touch with contemporary avant-pop. It was also a breakthrough in terms of approach, making clear that AC weren't constrained by the freak folk genre they were usually lumped in with. On Feels, they were as comfortable with the fractured, rollicking pop/rock of ""Grass"" as they were with the baroque summertime hallucination of ""Bees."" They weren't merely some of folk's most talented weirdos, they were some of the best artists America had to offer.
This year, the now-New York-based group released one of their most fulfilling efforts, Merriweather Post Pavilion, which was clearly inspired by Panda Bear's uber-acclaimed solo release, Person Pitch. As good as that record was, Merriweather proved AC works better as a tribe by fleshing out Person Pitch's meandering Brian Wilson and Phil Spector homages with flawlessly constructed pop songs—""My Girls,"" ""Summertime Clothes"" and ""Brother Sport""—and adding some dancefloor muscle to the mix.
I saw Animal Collective perform in the Catskills earlier this year, and midway through their joyous set I realized I was witnessing something I would not have believed possible back in 2005. Here were scores of people shaking and shimmying to Animal Collective like they were at a Girl Talk concert—fans were even pumping their fists into the air like rabid Bon Jovi fans. These guys have turned into the idiosyncratic masters of pop they always threatened to become, but more amazingly, they have done it without sacrificing a note of their eccentricity and creativity.
It remains to be seen whether they will keep fording the rivers of psych-tribal-dance-pop weirdness or retreat back to the familiar experimentalism of Strawberry Jam, but nothing can change the fact that Animal Collective has been the most uncompromising, inventive musical collective of this last decade.
