Review Summary: Feeling is good.
For me to try and dissect with a surgeon’s antiseptic attitude how the ticking dynamo of this album operates would be tantamount to sacrilege, an affront of cold-hearted calculation unsightly in a realm of perfect harmony. So I’ll try to spin a more human hypothesis; that the nature of ‘Feels’ isn’t just about the music. It has a voice, one that speaks in emotions and ecstasies, talking to a part of the human psyche lodged somewhere between our colour wheel of human feelings and what you might call the soul. Stimulation of such a sensitive area will naturally provoke a reaction on similar terms. ‘Feels’ gets back out of you what it gives. It’s a connection established through means touching on the supernatural but expressed through terms that are very much human; it’s this uncanny intuition that makes this the album that will stay with me for the rest of my life… I think. Or rather, feel.
So, I’m writing this review in regard of these feelings, crucial as they are to the album and what it does. In fact, it’s tempting to simply assert that the album is an experience so personal it must be addressed on an individual basis, and to go into no more detail than that Messieurs Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin and Geologist created something as improbably magical as this by taking dangerously gratuitous amounts of illicit substances then letting rip with the synthesizers. But such flippancy would do it a greater disservice than even the detached critique. So enough with this reverence – a guided tour is what’s in order here. Not that the album needs an introduction; it introduces itself quite capably with a nasal, electric-wire synth hum and the giggles of children at play; they draw with acoustic strum chalkboard pastels, sweeping and dotting paintbrush pianoforte, softly skittering wooden-pencil drums and paintbucket colour-splash cymbals and seeping fountain pen vocals, the lyrics it leaks splodged slightly beyond crystal clarity, but the handwriting still conveys the tone and shade of definition. A life-sized picture; and yet, it’s more than this. It’s a whole new world, a blending, meshing collage-cum-kaleidoscope of layers, evoking its own bona-fide reality detached from our own. We have stepped into the picture; Animal Collective’s dreamworld.
The dream only gets more real with the leaping tremors, explosions of squeals and Indian-tribal funk of ‘Grass’, and with the swishing, slow-motion submarining through the teeming coral reef of submerged thinking in ‘Flesh Canoe’. Our senses are awakened to this strange new world, and we begin to embrace it – as if we start believing that the dream is indeed lucid. For the uninitiated, a lucid dream is one during which you become conscious of the fact that you are dreaming; but instead of waking up, you can take command of your dream and ‘do’ just about anything within the limits of your imagination. ‘The Purple Bottle’, then, is the moment you realize you can fly over Mount Everest. Not only does it captivate such a feeling as it jigs manically between trying to express an inexpressible euphoria and simply being overwhelmed by it, but it actually includes the listener in that experience. The thundering, bone-shaking rhinoceros-charge beat; the magic-stars, firework sparks trail synthboard; the multitudinous choir of sighing mushroom men (no, really); and above all, the ludicrously bubbly “Dodo-dodo-dodo”s, “Hallelujah”s and “Hey-ohh”s exclaimed by the back-of-the-bus Collective - the band do everything in their power to make the listener not just a spectator, but to include them by stimulating their emotions. And what feelings they choose – the lyrics are packed with the dizzy experience of love, from a sort of infatuation that has smitten every bewildered, wide-eyed teen to have ever existed, right up to the head-over-heels variety, all rambled at a crazed breakneck pace that addresses that fluttery feeling in our chest we’ve all had. If you have even a shred of soul left that this song can operate on, then no matter who you are, at this point in the journey of ‘Feels’ you’ll be ridiculously high, embraced by wanton multi-coloured euphoria with neither desire for nor hope of resistance.
After the comedown of ‘Bees’, a good-natured meander of the so-stoned-you’ll-laugh-at-anything variety (and you do; with it’s whacked-out observations on a suitably comical subject matter, and it’s chilled, aimless minimalism, it’s endearing and humorous in it’s own pot-headed way), the album enters a new, mind-expanding phase. The whole mood changes with the contemplative confessional of the breathtakingly and triumphantly ambient ‘Banshee Beat’. Eerily intimate in it’s vastness of aura, it’s the first song of ‘Feels’ that makes the listener catch their breath in wonder as a progression of textures shift and rub like unseen hands scouring with levitating rugs, furs and silks. It captivates completely. Following suit, ‘Daffy Duck’ is just as dripping with sensuality, as meaningless childhood memories of the utmost importance are softly related over a soundscape that rolls upwards with the ambience before plummeting into the dead depths of an implied black lake. This, and the same limping chord plucked out with fatigue over and over, relate the loss and regret – the pure emotion from which this number was borne – with beautiful effectiveness. To complete the trio, ‘Loch Raven’ abandons lyrics completely for a sparkling aura of whispers, chimes and hushed chants; itself inspired by awe, it awe-inspires in its gentle splendor, emotion expressed without articulation, left to float non-incarnate in the atmosphere. More proof than ever that this is an album that thrives just as much on its splendiferous sound as on its communion with soul.
In a spectacular finale, the huge array of emotions felt by the listener are gathered up, summarized, amplified, and fed back to us with more passion than ever. ‘Turn Into Something’ rocks; I’m not just talking about how the music is unquestionably magical in the way that all sections have a rhythm that complement and offset each other with airborne grace, or the ways that the strings, ambience and synths tremble together as one living organism (we’re back in ‘The Purple Bottle’ territory here) or even how the explosions of roaring sound like warp tunnels that might just be the most tremendous moment of this astonishing album yet. I’m talking about what the otherworldly ambience at the end feels like; what it makes
you feel like. This is the culmination of the journey of ‘Feels’; an apt album title. Its final word is pure, superlative emotion; you have no choice in the matter. Sit upright. Try to comprehend; fail. Try to drink in the awe; fail. There is so much of it. Succumb. Listen. Breathe. Live.
Feel! The moment between the end and a return to normality (a feat unthinkable at this point) is a timeless one, a window of escape, the merging of two existences… something incredible. Indefinable. Unbelievable. Enjoy it. After all, feeling is good.
