Animal Collective: Painting With review – psychedelic playmates inspire and infuriate

Baltimore’s most admired and reviled band deliver a new album that is undoubtedly inventive, and at times weirdly satisfying – but almost supernaturally annoying as well

There are two opposing schools of thought regarding Animal Collective. One holds that the Baltimore quartet are adventurous sonic pioneers, whose restlessly exploratory oeuvre has succeeded in carving out an entirely new, 21st-century take on pastoral psychedelia, deserving of solemn appreciation and the most purple of praise: “[They mean] to create a dream land where music can sound equally gorgeous and transcendent if the anemone doesn’t sting you. Thus, the manatee stings sharply anyone who expects his danse to sound accessible or in any way like reality,” as one reviewer said of their 2010 album Danse Manatee. The other views Animal Collective as tiresomely smug, pretentious hippies, whose music has less in common with the fearless psychedelia of the 60s than the self-indulgent noodling of latter-day jam bands: they’re the Pitchfork Phish, and something ineffable about their music suggests its authors are the kind of people who insist on telling you about that time they went camping and took mushrooms every time you meet them.

Their recent work offers ample evidence for both readings, occasionally on the same album, as evinced by 2011’s half-transcendent, half-infuriating Centipede Hz. And sometimes the people trying to persuade you of the former interpretation of their worth end up convincing you of the latter, which brings us to Painting With. Its release was heralded by a lengthy, reverential US interview, in which it was revealed that the band “talked about cave people before we wrote any music”, that they visualised the album as “an electronic drum circle” and recorded it at the legendary LA studio once known as Western. Alas, the room that had once rung to the sound of Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Michael Jackson’s Thriller required modification before it was fit for purpose. “They brought in a baby pool. They dimmed the lights and lit candles. And they projected dinosaurs on to the walls, whirling the group millions of years into the past.”

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian