Animal Collective
Feels

THE REVIEW

It's important to begin the review of this latest effort by Animal Collective by clarifying two essential, brief, and clear points:
First: Animal Collective makes psychedelic music. It might seem like defining them this way is underestimating them, yet it already reveals a lot. The history of music offers us few groups that can truly be defined as psychedelic because, let's face it, expanding the mind isn't that easy. Animal Collective is the psychedelic group assigned to us for the new millennium. We should be grateful to them. They are unique.
Second: a clear, evident evolution following the short but intense career of the American band is towards a format increasingly marked by pop. This doesn't mean that Animal Collective are losing freshness and ability to surprise. Quite the opposite. They are gaining confidence in songwriting and incisiveness in avoiding energy dispersion.

Having said that, this "Feels" might even turn out to be their best work. It certainly opens beautifully with "Did You See the Words," a sweet, colorful, changing yet solidly homogeneous ride, a great track followed by an even greater one: "Grass" could be a Japanese melody sung over a surf music base that occasionally stutters and goes crazy. Result: a great single, disorienting, catchy but also rightly delirious as one expects from Animal Collective.
A first break comes from the seemingly shapeless "Flesh Canoe." Am I wrong, or do some things, at least in certain compositions, at least in spirit, remind of My Bloody Valentine? Take for example this passion for the shapeless, for the melody that emerges laboriously from the sonic magma expressed precisely in "Flesh Canoe."
But then we return to the multicolored carnival of "The Purple Bottle": a track that contains at least 4 or 5 pieces within it, all beautiful! Animal Collective’s inventive capacity is truly surprising!
At this point, something happens, it often happens in their albums, you enter a long meditative, indolent, trance phase. It's typical of drugs: There's the up and the down, the exaltation and the rest, the ecstatic vision and the mystic one. In fact, three tracks follow that slowly drag: the beautiful "Bees" (truly imaginative in conjuring oriental scenarios and a certain indolence from the sultry atmospheres of the South) and "Banshee Beat," the less exciting "Duffy Duck" (the only half misstep of the record, it drags a bit too much compared to the slender musical idea from which it takes inspiration) and the hypnotic tail of "Loch Raven."
In closing, we return to lively atmospheres with another great track, "Turn into Something," once again Beach Boys who took too many acid tablets, still extraordinary enthusiasm, verve, class.
Few experimental bands are as entertaining and engaging. Another success for Animal Collective. What next?