Review: Animal Collective's Fall Be Kind EP

At the close of 2009, while listening to the Animal Collective EP Fall Be Kind, it’s difficult not to get lost in this band’s labyrinthine aesthetic with the intent to give up. Shall we just surrender, turn over completely the year which was so dominated throughout by their January release, Merriweather Post Pavilion?

The answer is probably one you don’t feel you have the time or care to work through while you’re once again barreling down the Olympic synth half-pipe that is Merriweather Post Pavilion. (And judging by its placement on the best-of lists everywhere out there, chances are good you’re doing just that right now.) Well, 2009 was very kind to music lovers, and Animal Collective’s five-song EP follow-up to the goldmine Merriweather Post Pavilion follows suit by offering up yet more gems.

“On a Highway” runs breathlessly though the juncture between warm, primal drums and cold, detached lyrics. Equally gorgeous is the conflation of tour weariness with what well may be Biblical allusion, apropos to describing the now epic musical proportions of singer Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear). Given these dimensions and the track’s inconsolable electronic stagger, the lyrics sung by Dave Portner (Avey Tare) tease to the surface an image of the other, biblical Noah, post-flood: “Sick of too much reading/ Jealous of Noah's dreaming/ Can't help my brain from thinking."

While not cut from the same rather floral cloth as most Merriweather Post Pavilion pieces---and this is the only conceivable reason we can imagine for its being left off that album--"On a Highway” delivers that classic conundrum of Animal Collective sound: organic electronica. While the tone is in stark contrast, its effect is not altogether different from that exploding-patches-of-sod sound that set “My Girls” and “In the Flowers” apart as some of the band’s very best.

Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention "What Would I Want? Sky," which samples Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain” in a vocal loop that should be jagged, but runs in smooth optimistic cascades over the keyboard. And with “Bleeding,” Lennox showcases his sonar vocals, bouncing them off the background like bats gauging the distance between each other.

Fall Be Kind opens with “Graze,” a come-into-the-light sort of affair. It starts off with prenatal swirls, eventually breaking out into what seems best described here as a pastoral club scene. Yes, think electronic pan flute. It’s unexpected, even jarring at first. But then, nice to be reminded, after far and away the most easily accessible full length Animal Collective album to date, that they aren’t afraid to run risks.

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