Categories : Featured Review, Hard Rock + Metal, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop, Top Rated.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
Animal Collective did a lot of things they’ve never done before on their 2007 release Strawberry Jam. Notably, they relied more heavily on electronic soundscapes and samplers than on their earlier, folkier work, they largely got rid of their slower, more free-form dirges and they allowed pure pop melodies and song structures to enter their cacophonous sound more than ever before.The results were thrilling, creating an album that married Animal Collective’s boundary pushing experimentation with a heretofore unthinkable accessibility.
The four-song EP, Water Curses, finds the band returning to those slower, atmospheric numbers that were absent from Strawberry Jam, yet sees them retaining their newfound ease of access. The EP begins with the title track, its liveliest number. Here the band is at their most poppy. The song shimmers with a tropicalia vibe, buoyant instrumentation and the startlingly melodic vocal interplay between Avey Tare and Panda Bear. It’s the closest thing Animal Collective will likely get to a summer barbecue jam and is almost impossible to stop listening to.
The EP then shifts to ‘Street Flash,’ a brooding gem that slowly shuffles along on little more than some echoing pianos and Avey Tare’s mesmerizing vocals. In the past, Animal Collective could never quite get these songs right as they too often descended into directionless meandering. Here though, the band keeps themselves grounded, allowing for Tare’s nakedly resonant look at depression take centre stage as he sings, “Does anyone in here get hit with inside fever / So bad it’s hard to even move around?” and later, “I’m so sorry I came in late this evening / But all the clocks around the town had died / And all the fruit store’s colours were so bright / With couples smiling, cooking things tonight.”
The remaining two tracks follow the mood of ‘Street Flash’ admirably with sparse instrumentation occasionally punctuated by the band’s signature vocal eruptions, but can’t quite live up to the EP’s opening one-two punch. Still, ‘Water Curses’ and ‘Street Flash’ stand alongside the best songs in Animal Collective’s catalogue and offer even more evidence of the band constantly updating, refining and expanding their distinctive sound to create increasingly mesmerizing results.
