Defining the experimental rock scene of the 2010s – and providing their sounds to many-a soundtrack – Animal Collective return with their eclectic jibe of Isn’t it Now?
OVERVIEW
From what started out as a teenage interest in their boyhood heroes of Pavement, Pink Floyd and Sun City Girls has cultivated into a quirky seed of psychedelic rock unmarred by any other concept around them. Instead, a twisted musical language of their own was created as the fourth seedling of 04’s Sung Tongs sprouted out a new breed of audience-folk eager to learn. Now a year and a half later, than their late-career reprise of Time Skiffs, comes Isn’t It Now? With a career beginning in the late-90s and chartering on through to four decades, Isn’t It Now reminds us that sometimes bringing it back to classics is all that’s needed.
Rather annoyingly, Merriweather Post Pavilion invited a lot of dishonoured guests to band Animal Collective in the leaky boat of “sleaze indie” – a rather rambunctious sub-genre of his brother and another word for lazy – as the minimal techno-electronics of My Girls and Summertime Clothes brought commercial success overnight. But the band – made up from a load of teenagers from Baltimore County – wanted to be more than their greatest chart-topping album. Animal Collective may be categorically weird; but never shied away from their ever-changing landscape of exploratory spirit. Their twelve studio albums may be seen as stages of madness but it’s more new signs of discovery. From playing art-damaged gigs in NY’s dive bars to featuring on Skate 3, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and being a keen listen in Cillian Murphy’s ear, Animal Collective are a go-to alternative with a musical mind not to be reckoned with.
SONG-TO-SONG
Much like Time Skiffs, we see Animal Collective very much with their “traditional” rock band, as they make their native follow-up to an album’s successor. Soul Capturer is very much a contributor to your folk playlists chilling out in the backyard, as is Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone or Father John Misty’s ruses of Real Love Baby. While creepy and idled, Magicians From Baltimore dredge up a candid response to a loved hometown you had to leave. Either that, or it’s a perfect sound accompaniment to a dystopian landscape. The pangs and crescendos are quelled and controlled; like the very artists themselves, as Is It Now? confirms them as a mightily creative band. Defeat sees us take on a 21-minute escapade; an assembly line of musical impluses that surge and rise to your own terms of acceptance; as Panda Bear’s vocals call out over shore. There’s not fervent moments of distortion like albums before it, but rather, it’s an album with a clear oceanview from the dock. Gem&I is a funky temperament as they play into their Jamaican base roots while Stride Rite feels like a plaintive jazz epilogue of a protagonist’s’ death as it soars melodically on the clouds. The band stick to a strict rule of no single repetitiveness and Isn’t It Now is certainly no exception. The album – innocuous with bouts of obvious pleasures – ends with Kings Walk, a call-and-response beckoning into the final chapters of an equally magnetising 9-track album.
Despite being deep in contention with where to go next, Animal Collective never wish to throw us measly portions of half-cooked psych-rock modes and folk forest shenanigans. Isn’t It Now? is as inventive as Merriweather was with its sonic energy and is as traditional in spirit as Sung Tongs was. For every bit of psychedelic rock, it rests easy with his crack-open-a-beer kinda folk.
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