The first five seconds of ‘Painting With’, Animal Collective’s 11th album, explode into an overwhelming, ticker tape parade of sounds, its opening splurge heralding the Baltimore band’s least driven, most incomplete body of work.
Recorded in Studio 3 at EastWest, the very same room in which the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson created the iconic ‘Pet Sounds’ in 1966, there is a sunny, typically Californian theme that forges a loose aesthetic to the LP.
It is meandering, confused and relaxed from track to track, freewheeling with unpredictable force, and its rhythmical, at times entirely disjointed, electronic landscapes jar against overly manipulated, unrefined vocals.
Where it momentarily achieves addictive highs, see Lying On The Grass, it can’t sidestep sudden, anxiety-inducing low points like The Burglars and On Delay, which weaken the whole.
The overall sound quality is convoluted at best, but pushed to uncomfortable extremes at worst. The lyrics are often impossible to decipher and juxtapose aggressively with the echoing synths and electronic drums.
Expecting too much from an audience perhaps unfamiliar with the previous brilliance of Animal Collective, the weak tracks that dominate the album are hugely polarising. If a new listener were to base their opinion of the band on ‘Painting With’ alone, it would do them a huge injustice and neglect an incredible discography with which they have actively pushed for open-mindedness in modern music.
FloriDaDa, Summing The Wretch and Golden Gal, its most accessible moments, do give some shape to the album. Accessibility, however, is in no way a priority with this new, broader sound. Busy and abstract, each track on the LP requires deep concentration and understanding.
'Painting With' scales intellectual heights that may be divisive, but also remains entirely true to the essence of the boundary-pushing band Animal Collective aim to be. Inventing a microcosm of kaleidoscopic sonic bubbles, each melody that manages to break out rises optimistically, brimming with happy nonsense, before being consumed by the whole.
Animal Collective Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon April 11 2016 - LONDON O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
Tue April 12 2016 - LONDON O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
Wed April 13 2016 - MANCHESTER Ritz
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