“Shaper of days, you taker of life.”

Yay, another off putting Animal Collective release to tease fans who want a follow-up to Merriweather Post Pavilion. This time it’s a Record Store Day exclusive of droning psychedelia that meanders playfully but doesn’t have much to say. It sounds like a blob of sophomoric demos that these extremely capable dudes created in their sleep.

The fellows once again teamed up with filmmaker Danny Perez (remember ODDSAC?) to create an audio-visual experience that was presented at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. It was promoted as a collage of pre-created music that was combined in a randomized fashion at the live show. The trackless Gyrus moves between almost-pleasant aural soundscapes, spaced out psychedelic excursions, experiments with silence, and instrumentals interspersed with both sung vocals and sampled speech. In some respects, the thirty minute album version reminds me of KLF’s Chill Out, though it lacks the finesse, diversity and range of that album. It is also stylistically similar to Here Comes the Indian, but contains a whole lot more electronic glitches and distortion than that album.

The shapeless songs are reminiscent of the band’s improvisational live act as well as some of their early experimental material without the positive attributes of either of those things. It neither captures the energy of watching something unfold live before your eyes nor the gypsy folk spirit of the tribal early days. Instead of the endearing wide-eyed children of the early 2000s, this is a band who wants you to take their experiments seriously. So you actually have to try to enjoy this stuff for what it is, and from that perspective it’s a middling effort.

Certainly not for fans of Animal Collective’s pop-oriented sound, and probably not satisfying for lovers of ambient music either.