“There’s an arrow high in the sky;
Where we died, where we slept so sweetly.”
Animal Collective (still not yet actually calling themselves by that name) followed up their dismal sophomore effort with a live album of some new material that never got the studio treatment. A few songs are from a performance at a radio station while the rest are from a smattering of live shows. The album is characterized by loads of primal noise and intentionally unskillful playing, making the album a tough listen. Granted, it was originally limited to 300 vinyl copies, making it something of a novelty item. It probably should have stayed that way but it was eventually re-released to a wider audience on compact disc.
Occasionally the band finds a nice rhythm or an interesting musical texture as they tinker around with their minidiscs and synths, but for the most part this is an irritating chore to listen to. It’s better than Danse Manatee, though, because the songs actually seem to go somewhere rather than bleating on endlessly doing the same old thing for minutes on end. Because of this it feels like a more worthy follow-up to the debut album, which did a great job of building and releasing musical tensions, as well as approaching things in a slightly new way without the songs getting ugly as a result. The album’s recording was split between a radio show and live dates while touring with Black Dice, a fellow noise rock band that was a likely influence on the unmusical latter half of the album.
It sounds like it was more fun to play than it is to listen to, like the kind of thing you imagine a six hour jam session could be if you and your best buds each picked up an instrument you had been teaching yourselves to play for a year or two and just went at it. (To be fair, I am fairly certain all the AC dudes are self-taught.) You can tell they are enjoying themselves, but that’s because they seem perpetually fascinated simply to create any sort of sound. Of course it helps when a musician is “into” the music they’re playing, but that isn’t the only indicator of the quality of a performance.
If you listen closely, you can hear vague hints of future albums like Sung Tongs and Merriweather Post Pavilion, but these elements are pushed to the side in favor of intentional weirdness. It’s kind of fascinating to see how incredibly varied their output is in style and quality. Many artists spend their entire career churning out repeats of a successful early album, where you can pinpoint exactly why it is not as good as their old stuff. Not Animal Collective. Nothing is contained here that would indicate an acoustic live album would be recorded on a porch a year later. This chameleonism certainly makes wading through their discography an interesting task.
Perhaps you can find some kind of enjoyment in the harsh mush of these songs, but I don’t feel like working that hard. Not for a live album of songs that I don’t know from a band that had just released a purposefully ear-splitting album only a year prior.
Favorite Tracks: I See You Pan; There’s an Arrow.