“I should be floating, but I’m weighted by thinking.”

Featuring the first ever approved sample of the Grateful Dead in a catchy loop, Fall Be Kind is a neat wrap-up of the previous few years of the Animal Collective’s output. Bringing together several tracks that had been played live over the years and one brand new one, the EP gives us a handful of decent AC tunes, moving on from the summertime echoes of Merriweather Post Pavilion to an autumnal selection of looped beats and organic rhythms.

Most of the tracks here are minor achievements, standard AnCo fare at this point but still very pleasant. Breezy, echo-soaked opener ‘Graze’ evolves into a much-bootlegged flute jam track, while ‘On a Highway’ and ‘Bleed’ are slow-moving hazy tunes that feel like the MPP leftovers they likely are. The closer, the Panda Bear solo track ‘I Think I Can’ is a densely layered, struggle-to-guess-what-instruments-were-used kind of song, featuring a complex melody and endless layers of instrumentals. It sounds like it grew out of the same headspace as the best of his solo work, although it is more sonically oppressive than the airy production of my favorite Panda tracks.

But the whole EP is lifted up by its bootstraps by its best song, ‘What Would I Want? Sky’. It’s the undeniable highlight, featuring a Phil Lesh vocal sample from the Grateful Dead track ‘Unbroken Chain’. The big drum beat and loops of ‘whoa’ and ‘believe’ that open the track lead perfectly into the mellow section featuring Lesh. The sample is very unobtrusive, basically chopping up a small vocal sample like they do with their own voices all the time. It really shows how creative Panda Bear had gotten with his use of samples. It’s a great example of how stunning the band’s output can be when they focus and meld their outlandish experiments into a cohesive piece of music.

Favorite Tracks: What Would I Want? Sky.