After a rise in profile following January’s
Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective’s Trinity Centre return visit is long sold out. A new found fame which probably draws a lot of this largely static crowd (I know, I know, it is a Sunday night) out of curiosity rather than celebration.
For a band who have a rich history of insularly ploughing their own furrow, from their early noise releases, through folk and electronica. It is inexplicable, by which I mean fucking life-affirming – AMAZING – that they’ve hit such popularity, becoming a virtual genre of their own, ‘sounds like Animal Collective’.
Seemingly kicking older habits of using live tours as a showcase for new material, this current version of the band (guitarist Deakin dropping out for the moment) have hit a groove. Button pusher Geologist conducts the watery warm bass heavy electronica as backing to Panda Bear’s luscious reverb-drenched Wilsonian harmonies and Avey Tare’s tribal cymbal crashing, drum pounding and screaming. The sound suits this cavernous setting – hollowed out church (think The Point, elongated) – perfectly.
Excusing the hiccup of the electrics cutting out just as set-opener Guy’s Eyes is hitting its stride, there is less meandering and more cutting-to-chase than my previous AC live experiences. It feels almost exclusively up-tempo tonight. It seems harder not to dance to this (a task nevertheless taken up by the gawpers at the front). One new song is paraded, a relative slow-burner looping a vocal sample almost reminiscent of Massive Attack, you get the feeling this band have found plenty of common ground with Bristolian dub traditions.
Tonight’s set leans heavily on their latest release,
Here Comes The Indian’s
Slippi being the solitary gesture to their more abrasive beginnings. Songs are spliced, stretched and fused without interruption, dotted with euphoric tidal build-ups and breaks. While day-glo Merriweather standouts
My Girls and
Brother Sport remain relatively faithful to their recorded counterparts.
Strawberry Jam’s
Fireworks is injected with a virtual Baltimore (AC’s home-of-sorts) club tune, lifting more from the bliss-out of an early 90’s rave and a mile away from the freak folk of 2004’s
Sung Tongs, from which
Leaf House (or more truthfully, a version of) is plucked and given the full Merriweather digital treatment as an encore.
I realise I’m saying this with all the neutrality of a wide-eyed trembling obsessive, but really I can’t think of anything else that sounds quite like this.
