All In The Animal (Collective) Family
By: Raymond Cummings |
Sunday July 16, 2006 |
| Animal Collective's plot to take over underground rock culture is upon us with records out by John Maus, First Nation, Our Brother the Native and Cloudland Canyon. |
We're now well into the third wave of Animal Collective's plot to take over underground rock culture, where the twee-freak quartet's adopted second wave orphans' homies' records are coming out (John Maus), their newfound tourmates are staking claims (First Nation), and artists who laid down likeminded patter before AC made serious waves have found a fortuitous moment to go public (Cloudland Canyon). In T-Tauri, the Red Aunt-ish, AC-discovered Peppermints mingle with raucous AC-peers Black Dice; sample-friendly, freak-folk-by-email duo Our Brother The Native, who are preparing to debut on Fat Cat (the label that's released AC's last few albums), might as well change its name to Animal Collective Jr. And God only knows what post-post-AC homebrews are percolating on the CD-R circuit, barely heard as you read this; what I've described is likely only the tip of a massive, psychedelic iceburg. The problem I have with California native John Maus is that I don't believe John Maus. Songs is Maus's first album, and as he's backed long-time buddy Ariel "Pink" Rosenberg on tour for years it perhaps isn't a surprise that his own material resembles that of Paw Tracks' most prolific eccentic: a palpable sense of brain damage/insanity in the lyrics/phrasing, a significant degree of tape erosion and solar influence in the production, the whole "I am a total freak who writes simple pop songs out here in the middle of nowhere and no-one understands me but my homies and my 8-track machine" aesthetic. There are instrumental differences, i.e. Maus favors keyboards and synths and drums (real and synthesized, I think), whereas Rosenberg (who guests on Songs) famously makes all of his percussive sounds using his mouth and likes to flavor the keybs with plenty of guitar - outsider rock as rue, gumming up the works and sticking to the attention span even when the conceit at hand isn't interesting or the song is too long. And Pink - let's just call him that for now - comes across as completely nuts, all the time, and has that damn eunuch's falsetto to flip into when his affectless regular singing voice isn't enough to bury the hook (and/or whatever aspect of life as a broke-ass, self-described "tramp" he's explaining) in your memory bank. His persona is believable enough - and his sonic recipe captivating enough - that he's interesting even when he's sucking. Maus, by extension Songs, are a thin, dull imitation, with our hero stiffly intoning lines like "I need money for bills and stuff/It's time to get a job" and "It's time to die/And everybody knows that you can't ask why" and "Sex with movie star/Sex with Ringo Starr" as though he's practicing to audition for the voice of God in a cheap animated movie as his fingers do the keyb walking through mountains of New Wave cassette cheese. Animal Collective member Josh Dibb and Animal Collective producer Rusty Santos were involved in the production of First Nation's self titled debut, the best of the quartet of albums under consideration here by some ways. No samples, no distortion, very little electricity really, just three NYC women - Kate Rosko, Nina Mehta, and Melissa Livaudais -- doing their nature twee thing with a modicum of fuzz and fuss in a manageable half hour of harnessed, harmonizing girl-power. Gentle guitars flick and pick at silence, percussion and drums rattle, flutes flutter, vocals caress, trill, interact and hum, and out fly flustered, pastel birds of song. "I have no idea where I am!" an unidentified girl exclaims, on the cusp of panic, a mere three tracks into Tooth and Claws, and it's hard to blame her. Our Brother The Native's debut - the product of months of e-mail collaboration between teens John-Michael Foss and Joshua Bertram, who at that time hadn't met face-to-face even though both lived in Michigan - feels centered in the centerless realm of childhood whimsy, where developing imaginations are as grounded as the birds of flight whose cries sound all over this record. Like Animal Collective, Our Brother The Native employ acoustic instrumentation, tribal percussion, intercepted sounds (natural and man-made), and curdled vocals to give their manchild-in-Never-Never-Land unicorn-bait its impact; unlike Animal Collective, though, Foss and Bertram (now joined by California's Chaz Knapp) don't sound as though they're having anywhere near as much fun. Thus Tooth and Claws mostly moseys by agreeably weird, but listless as a strung-out trustifarian on holiday in Amsterdam - I'm not advocating the exact emulation by the inspired of their musical heroes (Lord knows there's no shortage of that), but expanses of dippy, drippy statis drag without a gearshift or two to shake the listener out of the resulting stupor aren't anything special. In one of the later novels in his Dark Tower series, Stephen King wrote about areas or mists where dimensional integrity was thin; he called them "thinnys." They sung an alluring song, and if a person listened too closely he might be attracted to the portal and drawn in. A side project of Panthers guitarist Kip Uhlhorn and German multi-instrumentalist Simon Wojan, Cloudland Canyon essentially make thinny music, scrambling textures enough that the lack of variable tempos on this debut is less of an issue then it is for Our Brother The Native. The duo's fuzzy, long-gestating compositions run a gamut of New Age pop, avant-garde electronic, and just plain unclassifiable: typical is "Opening/Rift of Ice," where compounding a recording of water gurgling in a creekbed, what sound like cymbals caught in a state of perpetual, laserbeam reverberation, and a repeating, glistening stalagmite of a guitar motif swen up by the sort of wordless, labored hum-grunts one might expect from some recovering from a stroke. |
