Strawberry Jam a triumph

By Jordan Sargent, Assistant Editor
Sept. 18, 2007

Animal Collective has always been a pop band — depending on whom you ask. Ever since 2000's Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, they've made a name for themselves by skewering and fracturing traditional pop sounds and vocals, often garnering lofty comparisons and parallels to The Beach Boys. ("Results 1-10 of about 1,400,000 for "beach boys animal collective.")

But looking for The Beach Boys in Animal Collective, though not exactly a red herring, definitely required some digging. Much like Brian Wilson's troupe, Animal Collective explored the interplay between multi-part vocal harmonies. But where the Boys vocals were pristine, clear and precise in their pivot-quick execution, the vocals on Animal Collective's early work are awash in reverb and electronic haze, leaving the melodies intact but the lyrics nearly unconscionable.

On 2005's Feels, the band fleshed out, but gloomed, their sound. Where their previous albums, especially 2004's Sung Tongs, felt like a stoned, sun-fried day in an open field, Feels was darker but prettier, distanced but cultivated. "Pop" could be found, but it lurked in the shadows, tucked deep into the corners of (overly) long songs such as "Banshee Beat" and "Daffy Duck."

For Strawberry Jam, Animal Collective's sixth and best album, the band, according to member Brian Weitz (also known as Geologist), aimed to make a record that would sound like what a packet of strawberry jam looked like to fellow member Noah Lennox (also known as Panda Bear): "really gooey and sweet, but also like synthetic and futuristic and stuff at the same time."

The result is Animal Collective's most pop-leaning record to date, though the band will tell you that's an unintended consequence.

On that front, the band succeeded. Strawberry Jam is all those things, but leaving it at that would be doing it an obvious disservice. It's a tightly wound and unsettling, yet exultant, record. It is one that exhales pent-up emotion with thunderous drum thwacks and exorcist-screams of both band members and children.

There's also a dichotomy here, between Lennox's songs and those of Dave Porter (also known as Avey Tare), that makes Strawberry Jam the unique and disconcerting listen that it is. Lennox's songs are unmistakably his, owing much to the solo work he's done as Panda Bear. The squishy, swirling "Chores" and the watery "Derek" are the album's blatant Brian Wilson-indebted, cracked pop songs. They're also the album's most hopeful, optimistic and loose tracks (real hippie shit, you know the deal), especially "Chores," which following the jittery, anxious opening one-two "Peacebone" and "Unsolved Mysteries," which culminates in Lennox belting, "I want to get so stoned/ and a take a walk out in the light drizzle/ At the end of the day/ When there's no one watching/ When there's no one watching." The song's final minute is a bit of beautiful choral harmonizing, the sound of cautious jubilation.

Porter's songs (the album's other seven) benefit from the contrast. His are of the "synthetic" variety, built mostly upon jagged synths and splintered samples. His lyrics, while more clear, are pointlessly nonsensical, but he's able to say more with his clattering compositions and strained singing than most can do with words. Juxtaposed with Lennox's songs, these are eerie, melancholy and unnerving.

But they're resilient songs, and that feeling is inescapable throughout Strawberry Jam.

"It's not my words that you should follow/ It's your insides," goes "Peacebone." He follows the line with a thunderous drum hit and a scream. Triumphant.

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Strawberry Jam a triumph

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