Animal Collective

The noise rockers expound on their experimental beginnings on Hollinndagain

By Crystal Nicholson
Published: October 23rd, 2006 | 1:45pm

Animal Collective’s recent studio albums are to Hollinndagain what house cats are to tigers: relatively tame and predictable. And the difference does not stem merely from a live vs. recording atmosphere. The hate-it-or-love-it raw chaos of Hollinndagain reflects an earlier, freer, and more uncertain stage of the band’s career.

Hollinndagain was recorded during the band’s Manhattan infancy. Dave Portner and Noah Lennox, the two founding members of the then trio (Josh Dibb has since joined the band), worked together at a record store in the city while also living in the same apartment. The new band created music continually, rehearsing in a Brooklyn practice space with more than 100 other bands in the same warehouse and without the benefit of soundproofing.

“I feel like our music is always so related to how we’re living at a certain time,” said guitarist and vocalist Portner, aka Avey Tare. “I feel like the songs are really crazy and chaotic ... we worked all the time and Noah and I were living together and it was just a really claustrophobic environment. Playing was a way to get all of our emotions out and one of the few ways of really communicating with each other.”

The re-released live album shows the chaos transferred well from the warehouse to the stage. With chords everywhere, microphones inside the speakers and no sound guy in sight, Animal Collective tried to manage everything themselves while performing, plugging and unplugging chords as the show drove on.

“The situation that we’re performing in has changed a lot. We’re able to control a lot more,” Portner said. “Things back then were a lot more hectic but I think it was cool because it kind of added this element of ‘Well I don’t know if we can actually do this on stage and it might fail but we’re just tying to do something that moves the show forward.’”

With most of the tracks on Hollinndagain the instrumentation is primitively dramatic and the vocals are almost an afterthought. On “Pride and Fight,” the vocal melodies are uncertain but gorgeous, broken under the percussion that at times sounds like someone slapping two Chuck Taylors on a hardwood floor. When strings enter they are also percussive and the song turns frantic and cannibalistic with war whoops and sacrifice calls. Yet the singing tempers the songs, entering to govern the chaos and, in this way, some of the tracks morph to resemble early Radiohead.

Other songs could make a soundtrack to Weird Science, with underwater vibrato vocals and fluttering dragonfly electronic noise. Animal Collective live focuses on the juxtaposition of light and heavy, loud and airy, conjuring an image of Tinkerbell trying to escape a chainsaw.

“We weren’t playing these great pop song headbangers so we had to make our live show a little more interactive,” said Portner. “We tried to captivate the audience with looseness and go on energy.”

Like the instrumentation, the song content on Hollindagain ranges from airy fantasy to grave reality. On the lighter side is “Pumpkin Gets a Snakebite,” the first of a trilogy about a character Pumpkin, which was inspired by a white pumpkin Portner had in his room at the time. The song infuses a trip-hop feel into the hippie jam.

On the other side of the spectrum is the deservedly anarchic “Forest Gospel,” sounding like anything but a church hymn. The song opens with a Sex Pistols drum roll and dissolves into angry noise rock.

“One of my close friends growing up had overdosed twice on heroin and there’s a drug reference [in ‘Forest Gospel’],” said Portner. “That’s what the song is basically about and me being kinda angry about that.”

At a time when the band has earned a recognizable name, substantial following and comfortable place in experimental rock, Hollinndagain as an album rediscovers Animal Collective’s more intrepid roots. The original was released only on 300 hand-painted LPs, and the Halloween re-release on CD will hopefully bring the sonic wandering to more of Collective’s latest listeners.