Pandas in the Wild

Animal Collective 'jamming'

Lately I’ve been listening with great intent to the new Animal Collective album, Strawberry Jam. Not only are they one of my favourite bands but they are also one of the most intriguing acts around today. There’s a tribe-like charm to the band, only strengthened by the knowledge that Panda Bear, Avey Tare, the Geologist, and Deakin have been friends since childhood. This sense of togetherness endears their musical meanderings, no matter how far off the beaten path they tread.

Strawberry Jam, which is only now seeing official release after months of Internet leakage, certainly takes the Collective in brave new directions; in some aspects it is their most conventional effort and yet it could also be classed amongst their most abrasive works. Unlike the band’s two most recent albums, Feels and Sung Tongs, it relies more on ramshackle electronics than abstract folk-interpretations. Among the other most noticeable developments are clearer, more discernable vocals from Avey (aka Dave Portner) and Panda (Noah Lennox), which results in fewer sweeping soundscapes, as instruments are crowded out by a more traditional fronting of voice.

Person Pitch

For me, it makes more sense to consider Strawberry Jam as some sort of progression from Panda Bear’s stunning solo record of earlier this year, Person Pitch - although Avey Tare, as main songwriter, may disagree. One of my favourite albums of 2007, it is a true backward-borrowing, forward-looking masterpiece. It seems many people share my love for it. Befitting the sound-file era it has arrived into, the album was not so much played out but meticulously assembled from disparate digital media. Lennox innately transferred his passion for modern DJ culture into something timeless, culminating in a sound not quite electronic and not quite analogue. It’s been described as a 21st Century Beach Boys album, and the back-story is almost as intriguing as any of Brian Wilson’s escapades. As Lennox asserts, it began with the trawling of the Internet for sound samples:

They’re all off the Internet. Almost all of them, something like 95% I just got from free sound FX sites and things like that. I’m kind of psyched about it being this real digital, internet age sort of album. And at first, I was like, ‘I’m definitely not going to release this on vinyl’. But now lots of people have been asking about it’s vinyl release so we probably will.

(taken from Rosequartz blog)

I can’t help but take inspiration from Person Pitch. The Internet is such a valuable resource for music-making, yet I still find amongst a large proportion of musicians an aversion to computer-generated pieces – as if it flies in the face of rock ‘n’ roll tradition or something. Noah Lennox, however, has shown in his work with Animal Collective that he’s not just some hunched laptop chancer – a stealer of ideas, some would have you – but a truly innocative artist.

Noah Lennox/Panda Bear

Have a listen to a few tracks:

Animal Collective - 'Peacebone'
Panda Bear - 'Comfy in Nautica' (legal mp3s courtesy of Insound)
Panda Bear - 'Bros (edit)' (courtesy of Pitchfork - note: you need to hear the full 11+ minute version)

[Panda Bear's Person Pitch is out now on Paw Tracks/Mistletone]

[Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam is out 17/09/07 on Domino/EMI]