There’s constant forward momentum, but in spite of the album’s energetic nature, it never becomes tiring.
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Instead, what we are presented with is a high-energy collection that steers clear of excess, offering up a deconstruction of the usual pop template while doing so. With and without their intermittent fourth member Deakin (Josh Dibb, currently off discovering fatherhood), the band have earned a reputation for fleshing out their melodic ideas with idiosyncratic weirdness and experimentation there’s none of that here. One thing that is immediately apparent on Painting With‘s opener “FloriDada” is that it is probably the cleanest-sounding AnCo album to date, occupying a weird space between hyper-stylized minimal-ism and effortless accessibility.
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Animal Collective as an entity has been mainly silent in that time, and the band appears on their 10th official studio album as a trio: Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Geologist (Brian Weitz). Since then, we’ve had a Panda Bear solo album and an unfairly overlooked LP from Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks. The prevailing mood throughout was one of unpredictability, but it was scattershot in the extreme, as garish and uncompromising as the sleeve art suggested. You won’t find anything particularly slow, and certainly nothing leaning toward the ambient side of things – but, then again, you’ve already plenty of material to work your way through should that be your proverbial poison as far as AC is concerned.In hindsight, Centipede Hz definitely felt like the apex of everything Animal Collective had been striving toward for the previous 13 years, charting musical highs and lows while pinballing between ideas. The intention behind Painting With is to hone in on the more rhythmic, frenetic side of the Animal Collective sound, and this is something very capably achieved within the LP’s highlights. Meanwhile, the motor-mouthed pace of The Burglars is one of the best examples of the vocal synergy between Panda Bear and Avey Tare, the group’s mainstays harmoniously slip-sliding through a ricocheting beat and adventurous Gameboy bleeps. Golden Gal is charming and silly, incorporating dialogue from the classic comedy itself. From its booming tom shuffle and irresistible hook (just try getting that “Flori-flori-flori-florii” out of your head) all the way through to its sneaky sample of The Surfaris’ Wipeout, it is a cohesive yet unrepentant beast of a song.Īdmittedly, nothing else on the tracklisting reaches these lofty heights – although this certainly isn’t to say that the record is to be discarded out of hand at all. Not only is this the most energetic opener to an AC record since the spasmodic “Peacebone” from 2007’s Strawberry Jam, it ranks as one of the best tracks the group have ever released. If anything on Painting With demonstrates just how far from finished Animal Collective are, it’s FloriDada. They’re not interested in the numbers game – their central focus is being as good as their last hit.
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As such, they approach album ten not as sluggish, uninspired has-beens but as a spirited, defiant and exuberant outfit. It wasn’t until their eighth album, 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, that Animal Collective truly got the recognition they deserved highly achieving on both a critical and (relative) commercial standpoint.