Animal Collective
Strawberry Jam

THE REVIEW

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.