“Is perfection a place, or just a glimpse at hard work’s face?”
ODDSAC is a video-album collaboration between Animal Collective and filmmaker Danny Perez. The imagery in the film is nice and psychedelic, reminiscent of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, but I don’t really think of it as anything more than an extended music video. After a string of albums that brought the Collective ever closer to a mainstream accessible sound, ODDSAC is a call back to their tribal roots, with relentless rhythms, pulsating synths, and distorted vocals taking center stage, the catchy melodies and sun-soaked production of the previous few years is nowhere to be found. Apparently the collaboration was in the works for quite a while, which explains its stylistic divergence from other AnCo releases of the era.
It’s never pretentious, but it is boring. If you are going to make a feature length music video—an experimental film, essentially—then it needs to be better than this. Adding a visual element to music means it has to compete with other mediums that require undivided attention; i.e. it must compete with good films and good books, which require your complete attention. Music, in general, is unique because you can put it on and do other things. It is nice to sit with a good set of headphones and listen with undivided attention, but most people rarely do it. You’re driving, or chatting with your friends, or surfing the web. But even when you do have an opportunity to just listen to music as its own activity, part of its appeal is that the imagery that the music evokes is unique to each person. Stealing that participatory role from the listener and putting something so-so in its place is simply a bad idea. I mean, if you think you will enjoy watching a wigged fellow in a fancy costume put a drum set together while another one waves a lasso and hollers, by all means, knock yourself out. But even by avant garde/experimental film standards, this is mediocre at best.
Only a handful of the tracks are proper songs, with the rest serving as “soundtrack” pieces. Although as an album it feels uneven due to the ambient pieces, a few of those are fantastic and would not be out of place in the tense moments of horror films. But most of the time you will find yourself vainly searching for something familiar, finding that something only occassionally, on tracks such as the closer.
ODDSAC is a descendent of those films by rock bands from the 1970s—Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, Neil Young’s Journey Through the Past, etc. Those were all only middling at best too, but at least they were trying to be something other than just abstract art.
It looks like something that a group of friends through together just to have some fun. That might in fact be exactly what it is for all I know. After all, that’s how these folks started making music in the first place. It’s only disappointing because they actually became good artists that were worth paying attention to.
Favorite Tracks: Green Beans; What Happened?