I Like This Song

Animal Collective, January 21, 2009, Bowery Ballroom

It was a small club, and even though the energized, psychidellic crowd gathered around them as if they were a campfire, and while they had parted with their animal costumes, the band somehow seemed to be hiding on stage. In my neon-and-wooden memory of December 2005, Animal Collective looked as devious as they sounded, and that one guy – Avey Tare, who does a good impersonation of an Animal Collective melody in dance form – was stalking about the stage, the way a criminal prior to a big heist, the way an animal might around his cage. As close as they were to us, the sounds – raspy brushes, spacey keys, oriental strums, an astral thump of shimmering drums booming through the wilderness, sometimes ghetto, sometimes glacial, all part of a vague life soundtrack then – turned the shoebox-sized club into the size of a museum hall. It was the natural history museum, the old air hanging like smoke, and, in my memory they were at the far end of the big hall, inside a display case of their own making, always there emanating something. And then, as he slithered in place to the music, Avey began rubbing his body with the microphone like a bar of soap, emanating hushed rushes of sound. Like a worm emerging from a cocoon, he began a bump and grind with the mic. Something naughty, something outside, far off.

So brooding-in-the-corner and modest was this band of artists – artists, not musicians – that at earlier shows of theirs, they had gone unnoticed by me altogether. My first Animal Collective show it turns out was at the Bowery Ballroom, but I didn't even know they played. (Admittedly, I arrived late, just in time to see the headliner, Mum) It was a famous show, a transcendental moment for me, but probably nothing like what Animal Collective might have been doing that night. Which is to say, simply making complex sounds, however they do it, whatever works.

(Something worked for Mum; one of the twin sisters is now Avey's bride.)

Fast forward, fast, past the ecstasy and tentativeness of the album Feels, my/the in-between-everything elegiac anthem “Swimming Pool,” to January 2009. Animal Collective, now three of them, is again playing the Bowery Ballroom. They have never seemed so high before – that is, three feet above the crowd, presiding over it, yet barely looking down at the mass of eager bodies ready to be awakened and yelp in response.

If the band had merely played their new CD, which may have been pronounced the best of 2009 even before 2009, the crowd would have eaten it up. And they might have played their CD, because this time little about their stage presence suggested spontaneity or improvisation or experiment. Instead they stayed where they were, behind their things (mixing board and pedals, keyboards, drums and guitar), seeming to abandon that sense of abandon that has always made their music so moving. And it still moves. But this time, they do not; they leave the fits up to the audience.

And the audience – many of whom had waited for this sold-out moment for months – were ready for the fever wave of kinetic pleasure about to wash over them. Already they were t-shirted and sweatered and sweating, a slice of a slice of a generation caught in a moment out of time between a hunger for hope (the new president had taken the oath of office the day before) and a millenial sense of economic doom. Those kind of pressure points can really make people want to dance, or go crazy, and that's just what they did at the slightest hint of “My Girls.” The sweeping pulsing synths began, and howls rose.

How appropriate that the song of this confusing, threatening year is not just epically orgiastic – shining synths, soaring harmonies, tribal drums – but also manages to state so clearly a desire for a quiet domestic life, and for this economy's most bedeviling and elusive possession:

There isn't much that I feel I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house

When the crowd went wild, were they ecstatic because they too, in the song's second negative, “don't care for fancy things” anymore, or because they like a nice reminder or because they just love the infectious sound, or because they were high? Probably somewhere in between all three. But the sentiment of the song is unmistakable, for the same reason that, for once, the audience could sing along to Animal Collective.

The chorus too starts with a reduction:

I don't mean
To seem like I care about material things
Like my social stats
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats
For my girls

This (“four walls and adobe slats”) is a formula for good living, and it, tellingly, begins not with what we want, but what we don't want. The sentiment seems to have struck the band first: in Las Vegas last year, when Avey Tare banged his influential drums on the song, the drum kit had turned into a lone drum, worth beating; And the band stood behind its equipment, nearly unmoving much besides heads, almost as if it were a rampart for the defense of the avant-garde.

If the audience were a mess of excitement, the band was content to be family, and in this flash moment, fixed firmly on stage behind their rampart, Animal Collective articulated so much awkardness and fear for us now. Two AC fans decided to leave halfway through, torn up as much by the weak familiarity with this kind of music as by the searing bright neon LED bars that blind everyone in the back.

In this moment of instability and uncertainty the band became us, scared. And we were them, excitedly, difficultly channeling hope and love and change. They stood still, contemplating their instruments and voices; we moved, improvised, experimented. In the wide gulf that has grown between the band and its listeners in the past years, in the club that night, there was a strange communion, an unspoken, imperfect, symbiotic bond. We know how we felt. How was it for them, watching us all flagellate and shift and grind, in the strange back and forth of this fleeting moment? To begin with, look at “In the Flowers,” which opens the record and opened the show to shouts, like someone throwing open the glass doors on an old white house, to an older meadow

My mind gets lost
Feeling envy for the kid who'll dance despite anything
I walk out in the flowers and feel better

If I could just leave my body for the night:

It is the wish of the listener, but in this entangled moment, isn't it also the dream of the singer on the stage, removed and stuck behind all his keys and knobs, wanting to move and marvel in this thing he's making? Think of how unexciting magic is for a magician. 

(Ah: Keys and knobs. Again, the doors.)

Then we could be dancing
No more missing you while I'm gone
There we could be dancing
And you'd smile and say, "I like this song"
And when our eyes will meet there
We will recognize nothing's wrong
And I wouldn't feel so selfish
I won't be this way very long

To hold you in time...

What is this conditional dream if not a description of utopia? The flowers are an easy symbol of a drug hallucination. But this vision is not that. It's not "so selfish," and it's terribly conscious of its own temporariness. It's only temporal, the way music is, and in the strange case of these experimental sounds, is a hint of utopia, a non-place, a location that's deliciously contradictory: both out-of-body and so physical, where we are held, but not in the way we're typically held, in space, but rather in time. Five minutes at a time.


Video from Hove in Norway in June

So this is how new music comes about. How new things come. It sneaks up, no firm references to anything, commitments only to its own world, possibilities, a possible new moment – and only for a moment.