“But I don’t wish that I was dead.
Now a very old friend of mine once said,
That either way you look at it,
You have your fits I have my fits, but feeling is good.”

This is the pinnacle of the early Animal Collective. All of their experimentation and shenanigans culminate in an album that is simultaneously challenging and accessible. While still indecipherable on the lyrical front, the album is soaked with joy and wonder as the band crafts quirky songs about horses, bees, and banshees. The song structures are diverse, tone and tempo shift, and nothing outstays its welcome, resulting in a thoroughly engrossing album that is full of pathos and mystery.

Feels induces a sense of nostalgia that mysteriously overwhelms the rational part of the brain that wants to pinpoint what exactly is happening. The puzzles that the band constructs here are somehow spiritual in their playfulness as they build on the ethereal terrain they had begun to uncover on Sung Tongs and Prospect Hummer. While tamer than their predecessors and informed by a pop aesthetic, the tracks on Feels are unmistakably experimental creations. The whole thing is perfectly balanced though—they never let their primal tendencies overtake their pop sensibilities, but they never get close enough to a polished sound for it to become anywhere near bland.

The integration of pleasant melodies gives the album a broad appeal. After an initial burst of energy in its opening songs, the album falls into a Brian Wilson themed trance. At times it is reminiscent of the Grateful Dead’s late 1960s experimental phase (though AC creates more varied musical textures for a richer sound). There’s raga guitar plucking, autoharp, durdling keyboards in the background, and some violin and viola (the first contributions to the discography by non-members). Interestingly, the entire album was recorded “out of tune” to match a collection of piano loops that the band had recorded on a friend’s out of tune piano.

Almost all of the songs can be considered highlights depending on the listener’s state of mind. I’ve found plenty to love in its more languid moments, such as ‘Flesh Canoe’, ‘Bees’ or ‘Daffy Duck’, its energetic numbers—opener ‘Did You See the Words’ and ‘The Purple Bottle’ are psychedelic pop masterpieces—and in the sustained chill out of ‘Banshee Beat’, which blends together a plethora of odd vocal tricks that sounds silly in isolation but work so well when mashed together. (Like, imagine how annoying Panda Bear shouting, “Swimming PooALLLL!” must be without the music behind it; but it fits the rest of the song perfectly.)

‘Bees’ is a clear sequel to ‘It’s You’ from Prospect Hummer, with its cascading, arrhythmic autoharp and impressionistic vocals. A disorienting song, to be sure, but a lovely one, too. Likewise, the unimposing ‘Loch Raven’—the penultimate track, just before the energetic closer—is another concoctive, drift-into-dream kind of song, with a number of indeterminate sound sources to accompany its chimes and reverbed vocals.

I could go on. There is really no filler here, nothing that seems out of place. The album is the encapsulation of everything the band had done up to that point without ever crossing a line into accessibility and polish that would dull its natural luster. This is the band at its peak; not at its most accessible or at its freakiest, but at its best. Feels is strangely alluring and remains excellent even once you really get to know it, each new listen feeling like another exciting step into the musical hinterland.

Favorite Tracks: Did You See The Words; The Purple Bottle; Bees; Banshee Beat; Loch Raven.

Sources:
Brian Weitz under the username “veyesor”. “Animal Collective Discussion: Deciphering the Animal Collective Tuning”, Collected Animals. 2006. (Archived).