AVEY TARE AND KRIA BREKKAN Issue #32

Pullhair Rubeye

By Sam Scranon
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Any collaboration between Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan would have a tough time establishing an identity independent of the well-loved bands from which they come – Animal Collective and Mum respectively. So when they joined forces on Pullhair Rubeye, there were two ways to approach this inherent problem: Treat it as a challenge in which they experiment with a sound distinct from its authors’ origins; or ignore it, leaving their identities intact in a colloidal mixture. Pullhair Rubeye, in most ways, opts for the latter.

The audience expects this before the first listen because Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan make no attempt at dissolving their separate identities in a new band name. Predictably, each song possesses Avey Tare’s familiar, floating acoustic strums, and kid-vocals ubiquitous to Animal Collective’s records, while Kria Brekkan contributes her fey, faerie vocals and ear for found percussion. And who could blame them for this? Their cuddly aesthetics compliment each other well, they are married, and each person possesses a ready-made fan base. So why mess with the formula for a successful, if not mediocre release, and experiment with new concepts, which could potentially prove disastrous and difficult to market? I can think of few good reasons.

But in the end Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan, it seems, felt dissatisfied with a predictable, average collaboration. Though the sounds present throughout Pullhair Rubeye are familiar, Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan added to them one element of lazy experimentation and transferred the tape to CD in reverse. Every sound on Pullhair Rubeye is backwards! Uploading “Lay Lay Off, Faselam,” “Sis Around the Sawmill,” and “Was Onaip” into editing software and re-reversing them reveals perfectly good songs, with lyrics even, but as listened to on the proper album (backwards), they are just annoying.

Listeners can treat the title, Pullhair Rubeye as an epigram, which the album’s content helps to contextualize. Not content to settle for predictable, Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan instead aimed for irritating.