Friday, November 20, 2009
Review - Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind EP
Posted on 11:37 PM by Clumpy
Rating: 6.8Animal Collective has never cared for much beyond sharing the unadulterated joy of creating music. Their fans can be thankful for this and their proliferation, having released eight full albums since their 2000 debut as well as four EPs, while earning their place in the upper echelons of music. Not many bands get mentioned in the same breath as Radiohead, or with the same reverence.
The band's last EP Water Curses seemed like something of a companion to 2007's acclaimed Strawberry Jam, showing a band at the same strange high just a few short months later, but with the looser compositional standards that an EP provides. Likewise, with its gentler sound and demeanor, still eccentric but lacking roughness, it's easy to compare this record with the band's Merriweather Post Pavilion, released earlier this year.
Earlier records from this band were defined by their incorporation of ostensibly hellish sounds and extreme dissonance into a wonky world music/pop formula without compromising the benevolent feel of the music. MPP, on the other hand discarded tactile dissonance almost entirely, relying more on classical musical styles of dissonant build-up and resolution for its effect. Like all Collective releases, the recorded succeeded on the strength of its textural strength and melody, though some of the color was gone.
Fall Be Kind clearly follows this pattern, giving the band a playground to sate its tendencies toward drone, occasional mid-song shifts and cacophonous displays of drum and vocals that seem to beat most chamber pop at its own game while remaining delightfully unconventional. Unfortunately, without the rigid construction, and the wonder of unpredictable musical violence Animal Collective has offered on all of their releases, Fall Be Kind comes off only a little bland and unmemorable. It isn't that the music isn't topnotch, for the most part, but that this style has already been done on Merriweather Post Pavilion and more effectively; for every nice instrument blast or vocal harmony that excites me, I can't help but think of a moment on the previous LP that pulled off the same maneuver just as memorably.
In a vacuum Fall Be Kind would be impossible not to recommend.
---Dustin Steinacker
