(4/5)
The sudden hype surrounding Animal Collective is evident in tonight’s audience. For every person here who is a clear obsessive fan wriggling little dance moves out along to the music, there are at least 100 furrowing their brows in a state of abject confusion.
For those woefully unfamiliar with Animal Collective’s genre defying ways, tonight is perhaps not the best introductory gig. Whilst the performance in itself is exciting, ethereal and dreamy, it’s let down by poor sound quality which occasionally swamps songs into completely distorted and indistinct noise.
However, AC plough through and it is a testament of their talents that a great deal of songs still manage to sound rewardingly exceptional despite the setbacks of sound. They introduce themselves with a low thrumming bass as pulsating synth lines simmer in and out of the auditorium. It’s an impressive opening that beguiles and intrigues. It delivers the audience into a united grinning delirium, as though AC were some kind of wonderful musical opiate and we were all breathing it in.
Songs are heavily textured and seem like small reinventions of extremely tired genres, twisting clichés and standard genre elements on their heads to create something altogether more interesting. Banshee like wails are yelped and screeched formidably and through a series of FX pedals which echo and distort beautifully.
Despite a brief lull somewhere in the middle of the gig that sees songs merge seamlessly and forgetfully into another that sounds near identical to it, the gig is, frankly, lovely. A persistent loveliness that is pop without being twee, experimental without being pompous and dark without being indulgent.
As the gig comes to a close, the audience has dispersed into a full on contagious dance-a-thon. Party poppers shoot off, and despite the band seeming very pissed off and having to interrupt songs to declare so (The lights are wrong. The sound is terrible), the crowd simply love them all the more for it. Even those initially baffled by the band are twitching about in a loved-up delirium, they might not know what AC are, but they know they bloody love it.
Courtesy of Thefly.co.uk
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