GETTING BACK TO WHAT WE DO BEST…

..which in my case is giving you some out of date thoughts on a few fairly successful albums which most of the people who give a damn heard about six months ago;

The Animal Collective – Feels (FatCat)

I have a real love / hate kinda thing with the music of the Animal Collective. Sometimes, when in the right mood, I can put on one of their records and silently mouth "genius…" as I lie back eyes closed, letting their world wash over me. Other times, their insufferable "wheeeee... Let’s pretend we’re little kiddies and sing in squeaky voices and run around in circles" type shenanigans makes me want to punch their fucking lights out within seconds of exposure.

In either mood though, I think I would be inclined to agree that 'Feels' is the best thing they’ve done since 'Spirit They’ve Gone / Spirit They’ve Vanished', their staggeringly good debut album from way back when.

Pulling away from both the incontinent racket of 'Danse Manatee' and the teeth-grinding sub-Incredible String Band whimsy of 'Sung Tongs', they’re back to doing what they do best. And what they do best is something that is simple to define, but that few very contemporary bands really have the power to make a reality: crafting genuinely experimental music which sounds like nothing else, but at the same time endowing it with the form, beauty and emotion needed to tug at our hearts and touch our lives.

Sonically speaking, it’s a very, well, BUSY record, with all four collective members throwing down sounds on every track for what I gather is the first time, leading to an initial feeling of being strapped into some disorientating fairground ride of ever-shifting dementia. But pretty soon you come to realise that alla this hyperactive fizz is meticulously anchored around Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s wondrous and unique song-writing. Panda’s joyfully off-kilter approach to drumming establishes a jumpy, jazz-like rhythm to proceedings, and the pair’s high-pitched voices squawk, trill, talk and just plain sing, harmonising and chasing each other through the songs with a subtlety and depth of feeling that makes me completely forget the number of times they’ve irritated the hell out of me on previous releases. Over organically layered fields of mysterious, shimmering sounds which are sometimes recognisable as pianos or guitars but could often have just as easily emerged from rotor blades or recordings of bears falling out of trees, they tell fragmented tales of childhood wonder, grown-up yearning, day-dreaming adventures and all points in between, exploding at the seams with gorgeously dazed poetics and networks of bafflingly evocative personal imagery.

Childhood memory remains their constant theme, but they’ve developed and expanded their approach, becoming less infantile and twee, and bravely casting lines out into the big, sub-conscious sea that connects perplexing kiddie memories with the anguish of over-sensitive grown-up life, hitting on the kind of vague, nameless feelings that we normally tend to stumble upon in dreams, not pop records.

'Banshee Beat' throws us into a vibe of weirdly innocent woodlands menace, like that feeling when you were 8 years old and a schoolmate who you didn’t really like very much told you the plot of a horror movie he’d seen, and it built up in your head into something far scarier than it actually was, and then you went for a walk somewhere on your own and it all came flooding out.

'Bees' is like charging around in circles on a summer day with nothing to do, yelling for a UFO to come down and abduct you. I’m still into that.

'The Purple Bottle' is, like, the best love song in years.... if you’re weird. And I’m weird. "I’d really like to kiss you, but I think that I would vomit!!" they shriek hysterically. Man, we all know how that one goes. What a great song. It makes me mindlessly happy, just like Bruce Springsteen’s 'Glory Days'. I put the two side by side on a mix CD actually, and it works very nicely.

So there we go. Out of all the Animal Collective discography thus far, I reckon ‘Feels’ is gonna be the keeper. Wheeee!