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Rating: Animal Collective are constantly on the move.
The essence of their sound emerges from their live performances, which are never the same but continuously evolve. For two years, they had been playing the songs from SJ live in one form or another. Now, if you go to see an AC live, these songs are already the past: they are already playing, in one form or another, the songs of the next album. The official recordings are necessarily approximations of a chameleon-like creature that never stays still and is therefore often blurred. Beautiful but blurred. After all, there are very beautiful blurred photographs, it's a photographic technique with its own dignity!
Strawberry Jam sees them attempting to better focus their current sound, which is more pop-leaning compared to the already song-friendly "Feels". Having eliminated the long dreamlike digressions of previous albums, the album reduces every sound, old and new, to the song format. The result is more than convincing and works primarily thanks to the greater variety of the sonic menu offered. The impression is of a joyful carnival where different stimuli and colors are unified to form a coherent whole with meaning. Indeed, the push towards the song format doesn't seem due to a mere desire for commercialization but rather to the need to create more coherent and smoother albums than in the past. SJ is the album that is best listened to as a whole, from start to finish, the album with the best track sequencing, the album that works better in its entirety.
It starts with a psychedelic nursery rhyme, "Peacebone", something I see as a successful joke, the "Bike" or "When I'm 64" of AC, with due differences in musical and stylistic sensitivity, of course. The heart of the album is the tracks like "For Reverend Green" and "Fireworks" which define a new musical direction, in some respects more traditional compared to past wild explorations, but not settled, not banal, rather offering disturbed views of the pop world with Avey Tare's delirious screams to sully the clear melody of "Reverend Green". Then there are the compositions clearly influenced by Panda Bear's recent, excellent solo experience, namely the excellent "Chores" and the concluding "Derek", two pleasant additions to AC's sound spectrum. There is also the desire to propose an updated and corrected version of the old sound: "Cuckoo Cuckoo" is noisy and chaotic but it is a chaos in service of an inner order, of a higher authority which is precisely the album's coherence, the greater good, which in the past was often sacrificed to let individual tracks run wild, free to go wherever they pleased.
A good album, in short, for those who don't need their favorite artists to always do the same things just to stay hard and pure. An album that is a step in an increasingly open and unpredictable path. An album that moves like a tightrope walker on a thin wire trying to satisfy the desire to evolve without betraying itself. It succeeds.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Peacebone (05:13)
Bonefish.
Bonefish.
A Peacebone got found in the dinosaur wing
Well I've been jumpin’ in all over, but my views are slowly shrinking
I was a jugular vein in a juggler’s girl
I was supposedly leaking the most interesting colors
While half of my fingers
Are dipped in the sand
You progress in letters but you're used to cooking broccoli
The other side of takeout is mildew on rice
And an obsession with the past is like a dead fly
And just a few things are related to the old times
Then we did believe in magic and we didn't die
It's not my words that you should follow it's your insides
You're just an inside
Adjust your insides
You're just an inside
Bonefish.
I bet the monster was happy when we made him a maze
Cause he don’t understand intentions he just looks at your face
I'll bet the bubbles exploded to tickle the bath
All the birds are very curious all the fish are at the surface
With half of me waiting for myself to get calm
I'm like a pelican at red tide
I'm a corpse I'm not a fisherman
A blow out does not mean I will have a good night
Chorus
Bonefish.
Chanting/screaming
Bonefish.
I start in a hose and I end in a yard
When I feel like I’m stealing I can keep myself from hearing God
Only the taste of your cooking can make me bow on the ground
It was the clouds that carved the mountains
It was the mountains that made the kids scream
Oh well she bore all her parts but she never was found.
You think I'll carve a path through New York
And be an artist but are you anything
Then you find out you can't ask a baby to cry
Chorus
Inside
Inside
Inside
Inside
Inside
Inside
Inside
Peacebone
Bonefish.
03 Chores (04:30)
If I say too bad
I'll take a lesson in my head
I've got to have till I am dead
Now I've got these chores
And I'm never going to hurt no one
And when at last
My work is done
I only want the time
To do one thing that I like
I want to get so stoned
And take a walk out in the light drizzle
At the end of the day
When there's no one watching
It's not going to happen.
04 For Reverend Green (06:34)
"Whether or not you believe it, you are
listening to true recordings of bigfoot
creatures in their natural environment. We know
these are naturally-- "
From one moment to a next
Reading in the papers to know what's best
Sometimes you don't know yourself
Eating loads of vitamins for your health
From one moment to a next
Red negativity in the street
Maybe it's the earth, maybe it's the heat
A baby on the bus smiled at me so easy
Now I think it's alright we're together
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's the best you've ever played it
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's alright to feel inhuman
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's alright, we'll sing together
Now I think that's a riot
A running child's bloody with burning knees
A careless child's money flew in the trees
A camping child's happy with winter's freeze
A lucky child don't know how lucky she is
From one moment to a next
A thousand wasted Brooklyners all depressed
The ins and outs of supper's chest
He'll only be a friend if he touches your breast
From one moment to a next
A shifting in the plates of what you ingest
From sugared tits to honeyed pests
Bulimic vegetarian wins weight contest
Now I think it's alright we're together
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's the best he ever played it
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's alright to feel inhuman
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's alright, we'll sing together
Now I think that's a riot
A running child's bloody with burning knees
A careless child's money flew in the trees
A camping child's happy with winter's freeze
A lucky child don't know how lucky she is
This one's for Reverend Green...
05 Fireworks (06:50)
Now it's day, I've been trying
To get that taste off my tongue
I was dreaming of just you
Now our cereal, it is warm
Attractive day in the rubble
Of the night from before
Now I can't walk in a vacuum
I feel ugly, feel my pores
It's the trees of this day
That I do battle with for the light
Then I start to feel tragic
People greet me, I'm polite
"What's the day?" "What are you doing?"
"How's your mood?" "How's that song?"
Man it passes right by me
It's behind me, now it's gone
And I can't lift you up cause my mind is tired
It's family beaches that I desire
A sacred night, where we'll watch the fireworks
The frightened babies poo
They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why
They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes
I was eating with a good friend
Who said "A Genii made me out of the earth's skin"
But in spite of her she is my birth kin
She spits me out in her surly blood rivers
All the people life lurking
In dominions of a hot Turk dish
If the elephants are reaching for our purses
Then meet me after the world with the shivers
"What's the day?" "What are you doing?"
"How's your food?" "How's that song?"
Man it passes right by me
It's behind me now it's gone
And I can't lift you up cause my mind is tired
It's family beaches that I desire
That sacred night where we watched the fireworks
They frightened the babies and you know they've got two
Flashing eyes and if they are color blind
They make me feel that you're only what I see sometimes
And I can't lift you up cause my mind is tired
It's family beaches that I desire
That sacred night where we watched the fireworks
They frightened the babies and you know they've got two
Flashing eyes and if they are color blind
They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes
08 Cuckoo Cuckoo (05:42)
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes
And singing his songs
Life was good now death's all wrong
Cause you can't feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray
For sun kissed golden days
I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
Little kids sliding down on the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that have died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
Two to three minutes doesn't seem so long
Where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
I'm going
I said please stay
You can see me, don't go away
I can't see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It's odd where I am
There are people you're not like them
They just look away
For rain quenched golden days
My tears quench five feet of lawn
I just creep I cannot yawn
People gonna come and people gonna cry
He just woke and ate and died
Don't try and erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
Where's my friend I want to hold him tight
He's so far away from mountain light
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
I'm going
I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
Little kids sliding down on the steel park slid
Little kids can't play with things that have died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
Two to three minutes doesn't seem that long
Where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
Well I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
I'm going
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