Animal Collective
Fall Be Kind EP
(Domino)

By this point, if it’s as everything Animal Collective does comes doused in pixie dust. Their songs are reliably transcendent, their live show is pure bliss, and their solo projects are better than most bands’ best work. In short, they can do no wrong. Capping a year that began with January’s visionary eighth album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, this victory-lap EP doesn’t so much hammer that point home as whisper it softly in our ears.

The first of five songs, ‘Graze’ opens appropriately with Avey Tare (born Dave Portner) drawling the line “Let me begin”, which later becomes a refrain. There’s the band’s usual flurry of bubbling, water-like sounds but also the moan of downcast strings. Tare’s voice is echoed and stretched before Panda Bear (born Noah Lennox) enters with his favoured style of singing: doleful and Beach Boys-inspired, pitched with much resonance between a yawn and a sob. Just when you think you’ve figured out the song, though, its middle section turns to a sort of jig built around a woodwind-like loop and handclaps. Vocals re-renter but now it’s a different entity altogether, with a bluegrass lilt to the singing that belies the syrupy backdrop. It’s gorgeous and bizarre.

Already historic before it even starts, ‘What Would I Want? Sky’ is the first song to ever include a licensed Grateful Dead sample. Grabbing a vocal fragment of the Dead’s ‘Unbroken Chain’, it establishes its trance-like hold early on. Whether or not the sample is a nod to Animal Collective’s growing cachet among jam-band fans, it’s wielded for an airy, folk-rooted catchiness that doesn’t abate over the song’s nearly seven-minute span. The following “Bleed” is the shortest track, and also the most ephemeral. Despite some soothing vocal interplay, it’s more a cleansing interlude sitting in the record’s middle.

‘On A Highway’ is a hazy slice of life drawn from constant touring; Avey Tare cites hash, sleeplessness, sunstroke, bladder issues, and too much reading as par for the course. It’s as literal and relatable as Panda Bear’s ‘My Girls’ from Merriweather Post Pavilion, and has a similarly ticklish slow-burn effect. Ripe with mood and texture, the closing ‘I Think I Can’ wipes balmy tropical sounds over a surreal bounce of percussion. Flanked with billowing harmonies and pinging melodies, its titular refrain just happens to sum up the Brooklyn band’s fearless approach, which makes it a wise place to end the record.

Not cast in the kaleidoscopic neon and pastels of the album before it, this EP is more filmy and melancholy while at the same time less electronic and somewhat terrestrial. You can actually detect instruments – or the ghosts of instruments – rather than simply marveling at so many studio-aided sleights of hand. At five songs, of course, it doesn’t have the cumulative power of an album. It’s just a quick snapshot of a band that mutates as a rule, and as such it’ll be some time before we know exactly how Fall Be Kind fits into Animal Collective’s creative evolution. Until then, it’s a lot of fun to explore.

Doug Wallen