Animal Collective on Take Away Shows

Recently, the awesome website, Take Away Shows (see link) posted two videos with Animal Collective as their featured artists. This matters. I told a friend a month or so ago that if they weren't the most influential band of the decade, I would give him permission to kick my ass (on a purposefully undisclosed future date). The cohesion of their band and the sound they create is evident in the grassroots publications, if you will, of their most recent work (see once again the Take Away Show Link). But one doesn't even need to look to the new year to see the evidence. Take for instance, their show in DC on September 28th of this past year, which NPR recorded and released as a free live podcast (still readily available on iTunes), which features their most cohesive confluence of ideas and influences yet. Animal Collective has developed into a vector of a band, sucking in any and all influences, be it Caribbean and African instrumental melodies, hip hop-like volume bass, drum circle percussion, synthesizer manipulation, mantra-like acoustic guitar looping, or even Beach Boys singing. They breath in their lives, mince up ideas like wild children abandoned by society, living like wolves in the forests of the world, tearing up their food, unadulteratedly howling, chanting, and banging. They are excited about nature and the simplest of social constructs. They dress like homeless young men from the pacific northwest or canada. They forget about manners, but do it without punk vanity or cultural disdain. Manners are a societal salad fork: pretentious and unnecessary- and therefore impure. 

Animal Collective's enthusiasm for being original unto themselves streams out so inspiringly, they begin to seem more than original. They begin to seem objective. So optimistically objective. And its great.

More on them later.