Water Curses isn’t set to be officially released until May 6, but as always, it’s a click away if you know where to look. Let me just say that it’s as stunningly beautiful as anything they’ve ever done, and that “Water Curses” and “Cobwebs” might just oust “Fireworks” and “Reverend Green” as my current favorite AC songs (I can’t keep favorites for more than one album haha). There’s no doubt in my mind that these guys are making the best music in the world right now, and have been for years, but between this new EP, seeing them live a few months ago, and listening to bootlegs of their new songs all spring break while relaxing in sunny Florida, my obsession has reached new heights. After returning to New York, I spent all weekend neurotically combing through all the non-album AC tracks I owned, and downloading and sorting through all the ones I didn’t have. I realized that there’s no real centralized place online for finding all this stuff (the Collected Animals board (R.I.P.) and its new temporary home are probably the closest thing) so I figured I’d make one.

Special thanks to here and here and here, which is where I got most of these from. Check out the first two links if you want to download full live sets.

B-Sides/Rarities/Unreleased:

Some of these are b-sides from singles, some of them are from compilation albums, and some have never been released.

206
Always You
Another White Singer (La Blogotheque)
Taste (La Blogotheque)
Baby Day
Bonfire
Fickle Cycle
Forest Children Risen
Dublab: Guadaloops/Another White Singer/Always You
In the City That Reads (w/ Arto Lindsay)
Lake Damage
The Kite
Must Be a Treeman
Peacebone (Black Dice Remix)
Pilot (Through Crash)
Polly (Nirvana cover)
Safer
Sleeper Factory/Doggy
Sponge Luke
The Purple Bottle (Stevie Wonder Mix)
Unknown 1 (Live @ Tokyo, 2-29-04)
Unknown 2 (Live @ Tokyo, 2-29-04)
AC vs. Kocani Orkestar - Oi bori Sujie
Deakin & Geologist - Seeing Twinkles
Avey Tare - Judy Biworker
Avey Tare, Kria Brekkan, Deakin - Live @ Glasslands, 1-20-08 (info, youtube)
Panda Bear - Laughed for a World Filled with Fantasy
Panda Bear - Untitled (visionaire #53 - Sound)
Panda Bear - Bonfire of the Vanities
Panda Bear - Live @ Má Fama (1-8-07)

New (post-Strawberry Jam) Bootlegs:
One cool thing about seeing Animal Collective live is that they surprise you. They don’t just stand up there and play all their songs from the album like human record players. I’ve seen them in concert twice now, and both times about half of their material was totally new to me. For their most recent, post-Strawberry Jam tours, they performed a dozen new songs “written in an intense two-week session before a May 2007 tour, months before the release of Strawberry Jam” (wiki). As usual, they developed the material as they performed it live. There’s enough here to make an entire full length and still have leftovers for EPs and single b-sides, as was the case with the SJ songs. If you really really really like surprises, you might want to skip these and hold out for the next LP. But even then, I’m willing to bet they’ll have mutated into very different, more matured beasts.

Bearhug (aka Walk Around [With You])
Brother Sport (aka Will to Joy)
Daily Routine
Dancer
Frightened (aka Dreamer)
From a Beach (aka Bubbling Sun)
Grace (aka Pan Flute Jam aka Nowhere to Go aka Street Vendor)
House (aka Material Things aka Little Girl)
Nomorerunnin’
On a Highway
Song for Ariel (aka What I Want to Do)
Taste (aka Am I Real aka At the Tasty Place)

Each of these links is to a zip file containing multiple live versions of each song.

Misc. Live:
Even when they are playing songs from the latest album, or older songs (or especially older songs), they tend not to play them straight. It’s far more common to hear strange, revamped renditions that flow into each other with fluid, semi-improvised segues and combine to make unexpected hybrid songs. And then every once in a while a cover works its way in there. Here are some of my favorite AC live tracks.

Bees (La Fondation Cartier)
Chores (Paradiso)
Daffy Duck (La Fondation Cartier)
Doggy (Antone’s)
Doggy/Hey Light (BBC Radio Session)
Fireworks/Essplode (Melkweg)
Flesh Canoe (La Fondation Cartier)
Happy Birthday, Geologist (Bowery Ballroom)
Hey Light (Antone’s)
Leaf House (Melkweg)
Peacebone/We Tigers (Bowery Ballroom)
The Purple Bottle (La Fondation Cartier)
Reverend Green (Paradiso)
Safer (Bowery Ballroom)
Sea Lion (early “Seal Eyeing”) (BBC Radio Session)
Street Flash (Bowery Ballroom)
Tiquid (Bowery Ballroom)
Tiquid (Ontario)
Tiquid/Did You See the Words (La Fondation Cartier)
We Bid You Goodnight (Incredible String Band/Grateful Dead cover) (unknown source)
We Bid You Goodnight/The Purple Bottle (Bowery Ballroom)
We Tigers (Antone’s)
We Tigers (Grrrnd Zero)
Who Could Win a Rabbit (Melkweg)

Black Dice/Animal Collective - Wastered

Tour-only 12″ split. Limited edition of 1,000 copies. Out of print.

A. Black Dice - Wastered (5:09)
B. Animal Collective - Wastered (11:52)

DOWNLOAD IT

Other Music (8-16-04):
Other Music is an NYC music store. AC played an acoustic set there in August, ‘04, and it’s so God damn fucking good that I figured I’d be better off just putting the whole thing up instead of trying to pick what to put up and what not to. There’s a few songs you probably know, a few you might not, and a cover of Nirvana’s “On a Plain” (!!!).

1. Warmup Song (0:48)
2. Happy Singing Band (5:32)
3. Unknown (4:46)
4. Unknown (4:27)
5. On a Plain (5:34)
6. Covered in Frogs (4:32)
7. Winter’s Love (3:21)
8. Baby Day (3:19)
9. Learning How to Dive (2:22)

DOWNLOAD IT

Spinning on Air (3-4-05):
A half-hour long set of unreleased songs performed live in-studio on WNYC’s consistently wonderful Spinning on Air. These all could have gone in the B-Sides/Rarities/Unreleased section, but I decided to keep them together because, as is always the case with AC, the transitions are really something to behold.

1. Tuvin (8:15)
2. Pumpkin Trilogy Part 3 (5:11)
3. Gas Mask (3:54)
4. Baby Day (3:09)
5. Playpen (8:43)

DOWNLOAD IT

Session Planet Claire:
Avey Tare and wife Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir aka Kría Brekkan aka Doctess perform acoustic guitar and piano versions of two songs from Feels and a Chris Smither cover. There’s videos available on YouTube. Kría’s voice is incredibly beautiful, but sounds odd when you’re actually looking at her singing. Avey makes really funny faces and smiles like a child when he sings and it makes me happy. I think this is officially an Animal Collective recording, and not an Avey Tare and Kría Brekkan recording, because they play all AC songs and because he introduces themselves as “Avey Tare and Doctess, taking it in Animal Collective style” and I guess she’s like an honorary member or whatever. But who really cares? The point is that it’s amazing.

1. The Purple Bottle (7:56)
2. Flesh Canoe (4:02)
3. I’ve Got Mine (3:54)

DOWNLOAD IT

Campus in Diretto, Paris, France (2005):
Don’t know much about this one. It’s just Avey, and it’s for some radio station in Paris. Acoustic versions of two AC songs, one Avey & Kría song, and an interview. I really like this version of “Grass” a lot.

1. The Purple Bottle (7:41)
2. Interview (4:08)
3. Lay Off, Faselam (2:53)
4. Grass (3:50)

DOWNLOAD IT

Panda Bear - Panda Bear:

1999. Hot damn! This album was out of print before Animal Collective even existed. It was released on Soccer Star, which later became Paw Tracks and now releases all of AC’s records plus a bunch of other cool stuff. Panda’s debut album has more in common with turn of the millennium electronic indie poppers like Her Space Holiday and The Notwist than with the somber guitar strum dirges or blissed out Wilsonian dub he’d be making half a decade later. It’s a pretty decent album though, and you can see little hints of elements that would later inform both his solo work and the music he’d make with Animal Collective. Pitchfork gave it a 6.5. Go figure.

1. Inside a Great Stadium and a Running Race (5:49)
2. Mich mit einer Mond (4:10)
3. On the Farm (4:00)
4. Ohne Titel (2:38)
5. Fire! (2:44)
6. O Please Bring Her Back (3:35)
7. Ain’t Got No Troubles (3:59)
8. Winter in St. Moritz (2:13)
9. Liebe auf den Ersten Blick (4:41)
10. A Musician and a Filmmaker (4:30)
11. We Built a Robot (3:16)
12. Sometimes When It Hurts Bad Enough It Feels Like This (4:01)
13. A Lover Once Can No Longer Now Be a Friend (5:11)
14. Ohne Titel (2:50)

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Avey Tare/David Grubbs - Crumbling Land:

“The sixteenth 12” in our split series, David Grubbs v Avey Tare presents two intriguing and highly creative artists whose work is defined in no small part by their desires to continually change and explore fresh territory. Both artists are now based in Brooklyn, NYC, and on this split, both have contributed tracks composed for separate art installations. The two sides neatly complement one another via markedly different sound-worlds, at the same time taking the split series itself into yet new areas.”

A. David Grubbs
1. The World Brushed Aside (10:06)
2. Theme from Horizontal Technicolour (4:02)
B. Avey Tare
1. Crumbling Land (2:03)
2. Misused Barber (3:01)
3. Abyss Song (Abby’s Song) (13:35)

DOWNLOAD IT

Ark (early mix of Here Comes the Indian):

This is really interesting. There’s so many layers and little pieces in this album, that just changing the mix makes it into almost a completely different album. Treated as such, it’s a much simpler, more direct album compared to the schizophrenic chaos of HCTI, and makes for easier listening. I love that it lets you hear little elements that you never even knew were there before because they got overpowered by other things in the final version. Like “Slippi,” for instance - by taking out most of the vocals, the guitar part takes center stage. The order of the tracks is different too, which allows for interesting new transitions between songs.

1. Too Soon (7:01)
2. Native Bell (3:56)
3. Daylight (7:03)
4. Chant (5:26)
5. Two Sails (12:31)
6. Slippi (2:55)
7. Infinite Dressing Table (10:51)

DOWNLOAD IT

And finally, I’ll finish this post off with this live video of the band performing “Essplode” in some hole in the wall in Nashville in 2003. There’s barely any live recordings of the band from this period, so anything out there is a real find. I can’t wait for that live box set!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.