{"id":2546,"date":"2015-09-17T11:06:57","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T19:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/?p=2546"},"modified":"2023-04-19T16:46:20","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T00:46:20","slug":"animal-collective-feels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/?p=2546","title":{"rendered":"Animal Collective Feels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Name check in this article<\/a>! Probably some of my best work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"32958329\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This 2005 Animal Collective Cover Story Sheds Light On Their Seminal Album, Feels<\/em><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Online for the first time, this story from The FADER\u2019s 33rd issue finds the band on a pirate ship in France during the release of their sixth studio album.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By CHARLES HOMANS<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photographer CEDRIC BUCHET<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

September 16, 2015<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2005, writer Charles Homans hung out with Animal Collective for this story from The FADER’s 33rd issue<\/a>, which also happens to be the Brooklyn-via-Baltimore band’s first ever cover.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, let\u2019s say that you were a little kid once\u2014most people were\u2014and let\u2019s say that your littlekidhood was followed by a drug-and art-damaged adolescence, which was followed by the beginning and premature end of a college career, and then a string of dull day jobs that at some point became adulthood. And let\u2019s say that somehow through it all, you maintained a focus on\u2014even a near-obsession with\u2014those years you spent screwing around in the city parks and suburban woodlots that pass convincingly for endless forest when you\u2019re less than four feet tall, pretending that you were all sorts of things you hadn\u2019t yet learned didn\u2019t really exist in the late 20th Century: a pirate, a knight, a cowboy. By this time, you\u2019ve replaced your given name (Dave Portner) with a mildly absurd variation on it (Avey Tare) and you\u2019re playing guitar and singing in a band (Animal Collective<\/a>) with people who share your obsessions\u2014some of them actually knew each other when they were less than four feet tall and one of them calls himself Panda Bear. You start cranking out records with the speed and aesthetic sensibilities of a hyperactive six year-old with a box of crayons. They have hand-scrawled artwork and song titles \u201cWho Could Win a Rabbit\u201d and \u201cDoggy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leads, paradoxically, to a lot of not-very-childlike situations, like a show in a converted church in Minneapolis where some of your fans eat an acid-laced pizza and try to take your socks off while you\u2019re playing. But you sense there\u2019s some sort of payoff coming, one your sub-four-feet self would recognize, and one day the phone rings. A guy says he has a pirate ship in France that he\u2019d like you to play on. Bingo. But early in the evening of August tenth, Portner, the other three Animal Collective members and their sparse entourage\u2014a girlfriend, a sound tech and a French filmmaker with a Super 8\u2014seem too exhausted and irritable to really grasp the appropriateness of the show they\u2019ll play in a few hours at La Guinguette Pirate, a Parisian club housed in a replica of a Chinese junk called La Dame du Canton and anchored below the Biblioth\u00e8que Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand on the Seine. Because it turns out that pirate ships present a lot of technical difficulties you don\u2019t think about when you\u2019re seven. The boat rocks in the wake of the barges that navigate the river at regular intervals, knocking Portner off balance during soundcheck. And it\u2019s a French pirate ship, which is a problem both because nobody in the band speaks much French and because there\u2019s a 110-volt gap between the American and European electrical systems, causing La Guiguette Pirate\u2019s fuses to blow with a loud pop every time Portner tries to plug in the tools of Animal Collective\u2019s blurry psychedelia\u2014amps, chains of effects processors, a sampler, a row of minidisc players, a homemade circuit blender. The sunlight that spills across the Seine in the early evening makes for nice photographs and paintings, but it also makes the inside of La Guinguette Pirate feel like an unventilated attic in August. And when the band tries to work out a setlist before the show in the cramped upper compartment of a nearby double-decker bus that has been transformed into La Guinguette Pirate\u2019s crepe stand, a cook angrily stomps up the steps to tell them not to move around. They\u2019re shaking the bus and ruining his crepes, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think we have a strange relationship with words.\u201d\u2014Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective\u2019s Panda Bear<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Animal Collective is on the front end of a rushed three-day, two-show stint in France, to which they\u2019ve all parachuted from different places. For the first extended period of time since they started playing music together as high school kids in Baltimore, the band\u2019s four members\u2014Portner, Panda Bear<\/a> (Noah Lennox on his tax returns), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weltz)\u2014aren\u2019t within driving distance of each other. Porter has set himself up temporarily in Paris, and in the past year Lennox moved to Lisbon with his wife, a Portuguese fashion designer, and had a kid. Weitz is in Washington, DC now, doing environmental work, and only Dibb is still hanging around the band\u2019s former base of operations in Brooklyn. It\u2019s alien territory for a band used to a close-knit existence and a heavy touring schedule, and they\u2019re wandering around in it, unpracticed and jet-lagged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in a few hours, when the sun goes down, things will look up. The boat will fill with people\u2014mostly male record-collector types in their late 20s and early 30s\u2014who hang off the mast and sail-less boom of La Dame du Canton like overgrown Lost Boys. Once the show is in full swing, they\u2019ll be happy to join Animal Collective in its goofy pseudo-tribal dances, the sort of thing most bands have been too cool for since Pearl Jam\u2019s Vs tour. And they won\u2019t seem to mind when the band plays just one song off of Sung Tongs<\/em>, its critical breakthrough from June 2004 and probably the reason why most of the crowd is here. Instead, they\u2019ll climb on benches and windowsills and do whatever is required in La Guinguette Pirate\u2019s shoebox-like interior to get a glimpse of the floor-level stage, as if Portner is holding some sort of tiny secret in his hands and the show will be a waste of their time and money if they don\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s a pop song in every one of those tracks\u2014it\u2019s just embedded and surrounded by this blanket of fucked-up sounds.\u201d\u2014Scott Colburn, Feels\u2019 producer<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The songs that the Lost Boys hear onboard La Guinguette Pirate\u2014most of which will appear on the new Animal Collective record, Feels<\/em>\u2014have lived like this for more than a year: on the road, in loud and sweaty incarnations that stretch their limbs when they feel like it, sometimes with inspiration and sometimes with indulgence. Describing the band and its music without giving people the wrong idea is hard, and the members of Animal Collective don\u2019t really help their case when they use the word \u201cjamming\u201d without irony and say the original Grateful Dead<\/a> lineup is the only band they would open for on tour (they\u2019ve turned down offers from bands that a lot of musicians in their scene would consider more enticing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The songs sound more subdued and disciplined on Feels<\/em>, which is a different kind of Animal Collective record. Past entries in the band\u2019s catalog\u2014which now stretches to seven albums and at least that many singles, split 12-inches and compilation appearances\u2014have been relatively informal projects with sometimes as few as one Animal present, varying production values and a general contempt for brand identity. (The band explains via email that it formally adopted the Animal Collective monkey in 2003 for Here Comes The Indian<\/em>, the only studio full-length besides Feels<\/em> with all four Animals on board, only because \u201cto have all four names on a cover or a poster was not very attractive. Record labels also started to mention that the band needed one name so that people could recognize them.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Feels<\/em>, Animal Collective sought out a specific producer for the first time and hired Scott Colburn, mainly because of his work with noise legends the Sun City Girls. The band slept, ate and watched horror movies in Coburn\u2019s Seattle studio\u2014another converted church\u2014for a month. They did eight or nine takes of songs and sprawled across a hundred-plus tracks of overdubs. They did the sorts of things you\u2019re supposed to do when you make a Rock Masterpiece\u2014and came away with a record that kind of is one. On Sung Tongs<\/em>, Animal Collective wore its encyclopedic knowledge of its influences\u2014’60s hippie outsiders, high concept avant-gardists and its predecessors in the early \u201890s indie rock scene\u2014on its sleeve. On Feels<\/em>, they swallow those influences whole. \u201cThere’s a pop song in every one of those tracks\u2014it\u2019s just embedded and surrounded by this blanket of fucked-up sounds,\u201d Colburn says, and he\u2019s right, although sometimes you have to take him on faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s almost like I don\u2019t want people to know exactly what I\u2019m saying.\u201d\u2014Dave Portner, aka Animal Collective\u2019s Avey Tare<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Instruments run together like a child\u2019s watercolor set, lyrics disappear into meticulously dense arrangements, and at times the songs are delivered with such a soft touch that they seem to be in danger of evaporating before they run out their time. The whole thing sounds like a trick of the light. You also have to assume that Portner is telling the truth when he says things like, \u201cInk is a major theme in our music.\u201d Two days after the Guinguette Pirate show, he\u2019s covering his face in streaks of the stuff, blue and purple ink, in Animal Collective\u2019s dressing room in a dreary \u201870s-vintage convention center in Saint-Malo, an otherwise medieval-looking city of about 53,000 on the Brittany coast, where the band has landed a choice gig on the second stage at the La Route du Rock festival. The room is deserted except for Krist\u00edn Anna Valtysd\u00f3ttir, the Icelandic pianist who plays in M\u00fam and Mice Parade and on Feels<\/em>, who is alternately doing handstands, reading a guide to the Kabbalah, and trying to figure out how to fly her kite indoors. The other Animal Collective members drift in and out. As the ink dries, Portner explains, \u201cYou use ink to write letters. Ink brings people together. I like the idea of different colors of ink, running together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You also use ink to write lyrics that are so private that you smear them in all kinds of figurative ways so people can\u2019t figure them out. You bury them in lush Beach Boys harmonies or under landslides of guitar atmospherics, or you stir them together with fragments of literalism and armchair mysticism until it\u2019s hard to tell which is which. If Animal Collective\u2019s eight year-deep songbook came with an index (and it probably should), a random pair of adjacent entries would read something like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danse Manatee<\/em><\/strong> (Catsup Plate, 2001; reissued Fat Cat 2003). See also \u201cManatees, mating habits of, as seen on nature special viewed by Panda Bear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Death of father<\/strong>. See \u201cPanda Bear: Young Prayer (Paw Tracks 2004), inspiration for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think we have a strange relationship with words,\u201d says Lennox, who with Portner constitutes half of Animal Collective\u2019s songwriting core (they\u2019re the only two members on Sung Tongs<\/em>). \u201cWhat we\u2019re writing about is extremely personal\u2014maybe so personal that we don\u2019t want the lyrics too high in the mix. It\u2019s almost like I don\u2019t want people to know exactly what I\u2019m saying.\u201d Portner falls silent for a second, then grimaces. He scratches at the dried blue and purple lines running down his cheeks. \u201cMan, it really burns.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Name check in this article! Probably some of my best work. This 2005 Animal Collective Cover Story Sheds Light On Their Seminal Album, Feels Online for the first time, this story from The FADER\u2019s 33rd issue finds the band on a pirate ship in France during the release of their sixth studio album. By CHARLES HOMANS Photographer CEDRIC … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Animal Collective Feels”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2546"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8089,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions\/8089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottcolburn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}