Animal Collective to perform at College Street Music Hall
What: Animal Collective w/ Tomato Flower
When: Wednesday August 31, 2022 at 8:00PM – Doors at 7:00PM
Where: College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510 Cost: $31.00 – $36.00
Age Restrictions: All Ages
On sale at 10AM this Friday 5/20 via www.collegestreetmusichall.com
At the beginning there were two of them — Avey Tare and Panda Bear — banging drums and tweaking synths in their bedrooms, singing strange and sometimes heartbreaking songs about imaginary friends and childhood pets. Carried along by washes of squalling feedback, the music was noisy, and it was weird, but it was, at heart, pop music. This was the start of Animal Collective. For fifteen years Dave Porter (Tare), Noah Lennox (Bear), Brian “Geologist” Weitz and Josh “Deakin” Dibb have been rewriting the musical map, their line-up and aesthetic shifting with each astonishing release as they continue their pursuit of a new psychedelia. Their wild path has taken them from cramped concrete basement
shows and forest floor singalongs to immersive installations at the Guggenheim and performances to millions on national television. So where now from here?
“Caveman circles,” says Lennox, discussing the vision for their eleventh full-length album, Painting With; “Caveman circles, the first Ramones record, early Beatles and electronically produced. I think that was kind of our starting point.” Dizzyingly upbeat and gloriously realised, their latest LP bounces and pops with an urgent, ecstatic energy, propelled by polyrhythmic beats and gurgling modular synth, with Lennox and Portner’s vocals gleefully falling in and out of syncopation and off-kilter harmony. The songs are as experimental and deeply textured as anything that has come before but sound as sharp and snappy as chart hits, finding the band at both their most minimal and most ambitious: “The idea with cavemen was about being more primitive — the way we sounded when we were first playing together in New York” says Portner. “I feel like what we were doing with the last record [2012’s Centipede Hz] was something a little more complicated. This time we wanted to strip it down and simplify it, like techno and punk… And then put the Animal Collective filter on it all.”
Recording took place in the legendary EastWest Studios in Hollywood, home to sessions by The Beach Boys and Marvin Gaye. Making the space feel like home was essential: they lit candles on lily pads and projected a two-hour reel of dinosaur movies — spliced together by Dave’s sister Abby — on a constant loop. A baby pool was set up to help add to the vibe of the room, but the group soon discovered it sounded amazing when thudded and treated with effects. “Everything sounded good in that room” says Weitz.
In their search for more organic sounds, the trio challenged themselves to incorporate elements they usually find off- putting, either structurally or sonically “I remember specifically we brought up saxophone and brass instruments” recalls Portner. They enlisted the services of multireedist Colin Stetson — whose resumé includes collaborations with Arcade Fire, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Bon Iver and Tom Waits — to appear on the album’s rapturous, swirling opener, FloriDaDa, an ode to breaking boundaries and not seeing any separation in people or places: “We were huge fans of Colin’s and the sound that he has is super unique. We don’t notate a score for somebody, so it was cool to have him come in and lay down a bunch of ideas while the song was playing.” After discovering John Cale was a fan of their music, the group invited him down to the studio to record drones for Hocus Pocus — a slow-burning collage of stroboscopic vocals and bleeping, squelching modular synth that gives way to delirious release. Discovering the song wasn’t in a key
the viola could be tuned for came as “a happy surprise” as they found themselves working with Cale’s material in new and exciting ways, his bowed tones and electronic manipulations forming a hypnotic transition into the beautifully sun- warped Vertical.
It’s just that that kind openness to playing with expectation and experimenting with form that lies at the heart of this personal and human album. “When we were doing (2007’s) Strawberry Jam, I thought it would be cool to literally rename ourselves The Painters.” recalls Portner, “Everyone kind of rolled their eyes at that one. But Noah brought the idea back [this time]. We talked about painting — cubism, Dada, these distorted ways of looking at things…” It’s all there in Painting With: the sound of artists finding vivid new ways to shape their ideas and challenge their own conventions, creating music that is at once startlingly fresh and still recognizably, uniquely Animal Collective.
Tomato Flower
Tomato Flower return with Construction, a new set of dense, knotted pop songs. The Baltimore-based quartet melds irresistible melodies with rhythmic trickery and unexpected structures, bending genre and palette at will; math rock, dub, and bossa might flash by within two minutes, and you still haven’t heard the outro. A song will invite you in with tones of classic pop music, only to freak out a moment later. Formal constraint becomes an opportunity for play and surprise; the pop song form becomes a psychedelic capsule.
Turning the band’s utopian impulse toward the worldly, Construction refers both to “constructedness,” processes of artifice and social construction, as well as the material activity of building. Yet for all their literary sensibility and taste for double meanings, Tomato Flower rejects ironic detachment. Feeling is always at the center of the songs, even when the feeling morphs and evades you.
Recorded in the same time frame as their debut, Gold Arc, much of the music came together in the peak days of COVID isolation in long days on the top floor of Austyn and Jamison’s rowhouse, overlooking old Baltimore architecture. The music itself evokes something sculptural; it alternately reflects the painstaking social processes of material transformation that create physical objects, or coalesces as a monumental abstraction cutting into the skyline.
The songs are intricate constructions of their own. A tight but jarring sense of form is central to the band’s boldly futuristic aesthetic. Drawing from contemporaries like Red Sea and Palm as well as older models like Stereolab and This Heat, Tomato Flower expands the rhythmic and harmonic palette of a rock band while maintaining the strictness of pop songwriting and its insistence on melody. Tomato Flower does not adorn their pop songs with experimentalism; they build freakiness into the form.
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