“I brought your records here to make sweet music in our garden.”
On their second album, Avey Tare (David Michael Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) add Geologist (Brian Ross Weitz) to the Animal Collective lineup to provide keyboards and other electronic bleeps and bloops. The trio moves away from the intriguing pop-oriented sounds of their jubilant debut to a juvenile obsession with making ear-grating soundscapes devoid of musical tension. The musicians involved seemingly picked up whatever was lying around in the studio and beat it to death (perhaps literally), coming up with some peculiar experiments with high and low frequencies that are aesthetically atrocious but perhaps redeemable for their youthful exuberance and improvisation. Perhaps redeemable, but I would lean toward not. It is interesting as an artifact of the seminal experimental poppers’ early years, but if it wasn’t retroactively attributed to Animal Collective, it would have a (deservedly) small audience.
The elements that make this album unique—its complete disregard for production quality, its structural rule-breaking—make it generally off-putting and headache-inducing. Just like in filmmaking, in pop music there are conventions that can be ignored if the musician sees that further artistic achievement can be gained by doing so. The band did this time and again on their debut album, which resulted in some delightful novelties. However, ignoring convention without good reason leads to disappointing results that seem pointless and artistically barren; and it seems like here the decision to break a rule was too often made without determining why they were doing so.
As newcomer Geologist explains: “We were also interested in extreme frequencies, both low and high, and how they occupied space in the room and moved around in your heads. That record upset a lot of people, especially the people that really loved Spirit. […] But we’re pretty proud of it.” I could see the three of them noodling around for a few hours, one of them meekly admitting they thought the result was garbage, and the other two convincing the brave critic that he was wrong, that this specific version of trash is actually good.
I will note that the album is slightly less jarring on a good set of headphones, where some of the elements coexist better than when coming from car speakers or earbuds. But “headphones albums”—things like Radiohead’s Kid A, Porcupine Tree’s In Absentia, or Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children—can be appreciated to a greater extent when listened to that way. You can simply sit and soak up all the glorious subtleties of the music. It enhances the experience, but you don’t need to listen to them that way to appreciate them in the first place.
The debut displayed a wide-eyed exhilaration as the young band experimented with pop forms, but Danse Manatee is a devolution into pantspissing childishness. Like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, it’s like the musicians momentarily lost not just their abilities, but their sensibilities as well. (Thankfully, like Reed, the band has plenty of other gems in its catalogue to make up for the album-length dud.) Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle are a potential point of comparison, with their disjointed experiments in sound collage and voice manipulation (check out something like ‘What a Day’ from 20 Jazz Funk Greats or ‘Walls of Sound’ and ‘Weeping’ from D.o.A.), though the chaotic sounds of Throbbing Gristle are often intentionally disturbing whereas the tunes found here are just uninviting.
There may be an obscure subsection of indie culture that genuinely loves this type of music. Those people have clearly flawed thought processes and should not be trusted. For an AC completionist, it is maybe worth listening to once or twice, but very little is noteworthy. Most of the songs simply go nowhere, and what they accomplish is unremarkable and unworthy of the repetition that they indulge in. I think I could stomach Danse Manatee if it was presented as some throwaway experiments that were created during the same sessions as Spirit; but as a sophomore effort, it is simply inexcusable.
Favorite Tracks: Essplode; Throwin’ the Round Ball; Lablakely Dress.
Sources:
Brian Weitz under the username “veyesor”. “Questions for the Collective: A Manatee Dance”, Collected Animals. 2006. (Archived).