Living & Arts

Mouth water for fans of Animal Collective

In print | April 3, 2008

Seeping through dense, textured layers of chiming twirls, clanging beeps, churning sonics and rippling delirium, Animal Collective’s forthcoming EP, “Water Curses,” is just as fluid, poignant, seductive and sopping wet as its title suggests. Flowing through 20 minutes of tightly tangled, intertwining songs, “Water Curses” trickles and drips through your fingers without being caught, runs smoothly and sinuously without solidifying into something concrete and tangibly, gracefully leaks through itself while remaining amorphously plastic and ungraspable. Quieter and more stripped down than “Strawberry Jam,” “Water Curses” is more similar to the winding, multi-layered, piled-on style of “Feels” even though the first three of its four tracks were recorded during the band’s Strawberry Jam sessions in January of 2007.

Beginning with swelling tinkering, fast-paced whirls and rushing, luxurious undulations of noise, the first song and highlight of the EP, “Water Curses,” is beautifully cataclysmic in its swooshes, scratches and reverberations, in the flitters of dancing sunlight that are reflected off the rippling ribbons of liquid water. As “Water Curses” airily percolates into “Street Flash,” the second track of the album starts off slower as it drones and drifts through beeps and bleeps, bubbling up on the surface before puncturing and rattling off into a colliding, electronic dissonance of static sound. By the end of the song, “Street Flash” returns to a buzzing murmur that fades into a choppy, staccato trickle that meticulously flows into the next track, “Cobwebs.”

“Cobwebs” is eerily haunting and languid with its dripping, resounding rhythm, ethereal whirs, accented surges of swollen cries and space sounds of swooshing rockets, shooting stars and falling, crashing planes. The soft pattering that ends the song so seamlessly transitions into one of the best songs on the EP, the last track “Seal Eyeing,” that the ending of the former and beginning of the later are hardly distinguishable; “Seal Eyeing” starts off with the floaty fluttering of a keyboard, the soft hum of whispered vocals, the chirping note of the songbirds in the spring sun and the gurgle of a babbling stream in celestial space.

The album as a whole functions to create an experience that is ethereal and otherworldly, submerged underwater in the clear, cool, twinkling blueness of liquid where proportions are distorted, colors blurred, where light bounces back, sound echoes and everything slips away so that once you resurface, all that you’re left with is what seemed so real in your own imagination.

Although “Water Curses” is not actually set to be released until May of 2008, any Animal Collective fan with Internet access has probably, by now, downloaded the leaked version of the EP that appeared online about two weeks ago. Though many would argue that downloading the EP before its official release date is both misguided and wrong for a number of semi-valid reasons — the illegality of Internet music downloads, the potentially lost profit and lower album sales, the seemingly demonstrated disrespect for the band’s desires — downloading and listening to “Water Curses,” or to any other leaked album, is not nearly as detrimental to the band as it is made out to be. The portion of the profit that comes from album sales that the band actually receives is, in reality, quite small. So while your intention in buying the album may be to support the band, you are ultimately very much more supporting the record label. Though supporting independent labels is important, necessary and should be encouraged, most bands big enough to make albums that leak are probably releasing their music on record labels that are similarly big enough to function without some extra fancy cars.

While the digital pre-release of “In Rainbows” got quite a few people worried that Radiohead would see declining sales when the actual album was released, in reality “In Rainbows” sold very well, with 122,000 copies bought in the United States alone during its first week of official release, demonstrating that music available for download in advance can still yield extremely profitable sales. Although it is estimated that one third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, that is, in the context of Radiohead’s idol-worship status, not terribly surprising or substantial of number; I have the feeling that that fraction would be more or less the same regardless of whether or not the album had been available early for download. In the end, big bands like Radiohead and Animal Collective have fans that are dedicated and dogmatic enough to insist on buying the actual album, fans that start foaming at the mouth at the idea of soon holding the officially released CD, complete with album art, liner notes and packaging in their very own hands. Just because people download the music in advance hardly means that they will not, especially in the case of Animal Collective’s cult-like following, buy it later on.

Besides, with music that is as expertly crafted as Animal Collective’s, it is much better to hear a full-length album or an EP in its entirety, from start to finish, the way it was mean to be heard, than to hear arbitrary singles out of place and out of context — all the more reason to preemptively download and listen to “Water Curses” now if you haven’t already, before you start hearing middle 30 seconds interludes of “Street Flash” chiming from that room across the bathroom.

Anna is a sophomore. You can reach her at azaloko1@swarthmore.edu.