ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Feels
Fat Cat
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AUDIO CLIP
"The Purple Bottle"
What's good about Animal Collective's latest effort, Feels, is that the songs are uniformly listenable, no longer swathed, as their past efforts often were, in that dissonant veneer of weirdness for weirdness's sake. You don't need to be off your face on chemical enhancers to appreciate the warm guitars and swirling melodies bursting from "Did You See the Words" or the jittery country jangle coursing through "The Purple Bottle." As it turns out, though, its weirdness and obtuse tendencies kept the Collective from sounding like every other band in the known universe that worships Pet Sounds. The deliberate amateurishness of its 2004 semi-breakthrough Sung Tongs hasn't totally receded, but it's been cleaned up to the point where tunes like the woozy "Flesh Canoe" and the shambolic folk-pop jaunt "Turn Into Something" wouldn't sound out of place on a Flaming Lips or Grandaddy album. Feels is certainly an evolution, but who knew these guys would evolve into something so, well, normal?
-- David Peisner
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