“My mind is not unkind it’s just not open.”
The members of Animal Collective knew one another from a young age, playing covers of punk songs and taking acid together in high school. They bonded over their shared love of Pavement and horror films, and began creating tapes with various combinations of the members performing together. Eventually Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished appeared in 2000—a creation of two young men that were barely twenty years old.
Let’s be clear: if Animal Collective had not gone onto release a string of albums considered to be modern indie classics, few people would have ever heard this inauspicious debut that was originally attributed to Avey Tare (David Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox). Though they have always experimented with an incredible variety of instrumentation and soundscapes, their more commercial work later in the 2000s is what brought them notoriety. Because of its experimental nature, Spirit isn’t the kind of album that I can just pull a track from at random and enjoy. It contains a few songs that can stand alone, but its exploratory tracks require a more patient and invested listen, and could easily come across as inconsequential noise.
The album is a mix of acoustic guitars, brushed drumming, sampled sounds, and variably pleasant and ear grating electronics, but that’s too simple to describe what’s going on. They don’t necessarily introduce any single element that hasn’t been heard before, but the conventional pop structures are lengthened, mixed and matched, and adorned in such a way as to create a unique and unsettling experience. It’s kind of like a David Lynch film—at a glance it could pass as an amateur attempt at mimicking a popular analog, but if you peel back its layers, you find it is a creation of an endlessly complex and inspired artist.
In its simpler moments (‘April and the Phantom’ or ‘Bat You’ll Fly’) the duo sounds like a modern, electronica influenced version of early T. Rex. Avey Tare’s voice is intentionally obscure within the mix, and the lyrics are often indecipherable. Many of the songs are intentionally grating on the ears, with harsh sounds, high-pitched electronic warbles and bloops, and unique, non-musical samples1 featured heavily. At times, the band experiments with using their voices as instruments (e.g. midway through album closer ‘Alvin Row’), a technique which would be repeated in different ways throughout the band’s career.2
New artists seldom construct songs with such tension as ‘April And The Phantom’ or build staggering works of the density, varying style, and length of ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, ‘Chocolate Girl’, ‘La Rapet’, and ‘Alvin Row’—all greater than seven minutes long. Even something like ‘Untitled’—at first seemingly just a harsh mix of electronic screeching—eventually blossoms as it winds down into an eerily haunting ambient piece similar to ‘Sleeping on the Roof’ from the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin.
The two musicians certainly deserve credit for their audaciousness and desire to just let their ideas take them where they may. Not everything works perfectly, and parts of the album require some colored glasses to appreciate, but for a barely-heard debut of one of the most innovative acts of the 2000s, it is plenty palatable.
Favorite Tracks: April and the Phantom; Chocolate Girl; Alvin Row.
1. A loop of a child’s voice closes the album, reminiscent of tracks from MF Doom or Madlib.
2. One of my favorite tracks from Panda Bear’s 2007 album Person Pitch is the penultimate ‘Search For Delicious’ which is chock full of heavily effected vocals, creating an eerie yet beautiful song.
Sources:
David Portner under the name “wheeter”. “Questions for the Collective: early years and music”, Collected Animals. 2006. (Archived).