Animal Collective, Battles - London Astoria - 13/7/06
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
You'd hate to be another even mildly epic rock and roll combo in the capital this evening. The amount of reverb used by Animal Collective is so great that, last Thursday, there mustn't have been any left in London town for anyone else to utilise. U2, if they'd have plugged in their instruments at Wembley Arena across town, would have found their attempts at epic totally swallowed by the Collective, and as such sounded like a skiffle band. Therein, we have a case for why Animal Collective should play in London all the doggone time.
Say what you like about its sticky floors and overpriced beverages, but The Astoria consistently is host to a US band's breakthrough show, tonight being another to add to a list which recently welcomed Death Cab For Cutie as new members. 'I was there' moments. It's had a few. Tonight suggests a few things, other than the greatness of the venue and the merits of perpetual Animal Collective shows, which we could change about music.
For one, bass players are useless. Really, you can make the woozy swirling brilliance of Animal Collective and the bizarre futuristic party music of Battles without picking up something so vulgarly low toned even once. OK, Battles grab one for a few songs, but they needn't - they perfectly demonstrate all that is needed to make vigorously interesting dance music merely with guitars, laptops, a bafflingly talented drummer and the odd smack of a synthesiser.
Let's explain why I called it dance music - this is a sound which would be loathe to use tinny drum machines, tired synth riffs or the pathetic attempts at a chorus which most dance music delves in to. In fact, it sounds nothing like contemporary mainstream dance whatsoever - it's intricate, noisy, mathematically complicated, everything dance isn't. But crumbs, this really is f**king dance music and nothing else - itchy, impatient, rapturous. You might find it difficult to move to at first, but that'll only be because the rhythms are so complex - let yourself go and just see what happens to your limbs. Forget concentrating on the beat, just let it find you. Pick one thing - the way they can play three instruments at once, the way they seem to get totally carried away with jigging around to their own sound, the way the drum kit has one cymbal reaching metres and metres towards the ceiling which is only hit if the narrative created by the ever evolving sound needs a sort of exclamation mark to add emphasis. Fix your eyes on that for a minute. Soon, you'll find your foot perversely tapping. The rest of the body follows suit.
So, that was the support? Great. Following their work with something entirely different (why bands who support other acts with a similar sound is a complete mystery to me) come Animal Collective. And where they share the distain for the bass guitar held by their supporting act, this lot go even further. Bass drums? Pah. Who needs 'em?
No bass drums, no bass guitars, nothing really resembling any sort of recognisably structured song or melody. Animal Collective are one of those special bunches of fellas who might well be the only four people walking the globe who could have come up with this sound - this markedly claustrophobic, meandering, hazy ramble of music which gives way to outbursts of unadulterated noise, rampant yelping and, just occasionally, remarkably accomplished song writing, too.
The noise flows from one piece of melody to another, never letting in anything as out of place as silence, and as the set travels onwards in to time the audience eventually look as hypnotised as the folk on the stage, who spend their time running around, swaying the torches on their heads in bizarre half time to what's going on and cracking microphone cables as if they were whips, as if trying to beat the sound out of the Astoria stage floor. I assume this is everyone's favourite thing about it - Animal Collective, admittedly, do tonight at least seem to do just the one thing, that being the offering of highly successful variations on their hazy, otherworldly curious rock and roll. But in contributing that they also suggest so much more, that they're capable of producing absolutely any sound whatsoever, and that for reasons entirely of their choosing (not to do with limits on their powers), they stick with this one, peppering it with all sorts of others but keeping their true craft staunchly at its core. It makes for a thoroughly exciting, never being able to predict what'll happen next type of show.
A band not constrained by their own abilities nor the on looking eyes of the jealous mainstream. If you hadn't gathered from that exposition of their musical gifts that rambled in the paragraph above, it made for a unique live show, the sort of which only they could, or will, deliver. Battles - we danced. AC - we hypnotically applauded.
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