Down There

Animal Collective is not every indie kid’s favorite band. In fact I hear some actually prefer Titus Andronicus, and the ones who’ve never been to Brooklyn like The Arcade Fire. There are probably a fair amount of kids traversing Brooklyn in skinny jeans and baseball caps (their brims un-folded) who could only name one member of the Animal Collective: Panda Bear. Noah Lennox has gotten to be the loveable member of Animal Collective, despite seeming more socially awkward and reticent than his band mates and never quite sharing equal billing with Animal Collective’s core member Dave Portner or Avey Tare, compositionally. Panda Bear is a great songwriter, but his songs don’t overshadow Tare’s as the great disparity in the popularities of their solo works suggest. Avey Tare sings less like Sting. His solo work lacks the swaggering hip hop beats of “Slow Motion.” He is not a dad, yet. He doesn’t live in Lisbon. These might all be a part of the problem.

Down There opens with “Laughing Hieroglyphics,” a seven minute song that evokes a hung-over morning after a night at a frightening vaudevillian carnival. Based largely on an accordion, which instantly brings his wife, who played accordion in múm, to mind, it might be the album’s best track. The album is somewhat top-heavy, with many of its best tracks appearing in the first half , but much like Animal Collective’s 2005 album Feels, (on which Avey Tare wrote every song but one) the album picks up again toward the end after a spacey lull. Unlike Feels, this lull is under ten minutes long and it is not the best part of the album. If Feels captured the motes dancing in the percolating sunlight of a valley and then receded into a dark, mystical forest only to emerge again triumphant at a sunny shoreline, Down There seems to follow a temporal arc that could not be more different, but is also oddly the same.

The light one wakes up in during “Laughing Hieroglyphics” is like the city on a foggy morning. Down There is a little chilly, and sounds like a cross-town walk on a sleepy morning of a day on which the sun never truly rises. “3 Umbrellas” is as close to ebullience as Down There gets. Its lyrical imagery and plinking piano evoke soft rain. Its guitar passages (which are masked exactly as those on Fall Be Kind are) play the haze. The dubiously titled “Oliver Twist” sounds subterranean, evokes a long cluttered wait for the R train. Avey Tare’s voice’s pitch is tweaked to eerie and hooky effect. Its chorus is the catchiest on the album, and is shrouded in rustling and wafting drones that would not have been foreign to an early Small Black song.

Like Feels, night falls, but when it does the sun doesn’t rise. There are a few slower songs that recede from the listener’s attention, flowing seamlessly into one another, one of Down There’s most admirable characteristics. The segues between songs are orchestrated perfectly, reminiscent of AC’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Strawberry Jam, but in a manner consistent with Down There’s sound, are even subtler. The album picks up again during the second half of “Heather in the Hospital” and continues through closer and first single “Lucky 1.” “Lucky 1” is a walk beneath the el. Something that you pray is water drips down on you steadily, beneath the tracks. A familiar electronic buzz resounds; the album’s best percussion hisses and clinks, a far-off cymbal is struck. The sun has yet to rise and you worry for your wallet. This night is warmer than the last. A strange image of Brooklyn, Tare’s current place of residence, passes in the periphery, somewhat akin to Henry Miller’s idealized dystopian Brooklyn of Tropic of Capricorn. An organ pumps, suggesting the accordion of “Laughing Hieroglyphic” and a full circle is drawn out in the yellow fog that rises from street-side vents. You can almost see Avey Tare smile, as he grimaces, inquires, “Are you crying?”
Written by Josh Ginsberg