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Animal Collective’s Ave Tare releases a fairly typical collection of gnomic squeaks, blabbering and mutterings set over a restless shifting electronic backdrop. Now, how’s that for a pithy summary? It’s not a bad record at all actually, and at times the elegiac muse that propels the main work of his parent band smashes through, as on Laughing Hieroglyph or Heather in the Hospital, where the mix of folky lullaby and weird sounds create brilliant, wistful laments which yet again nod back to the Beatles and the Beach Boys. There are some mental moments: now and again on tracks like the music judders into a form of pastoral rave like on the highlight, Oliver Twist.
As with anything this band or their member s do there’s a cloistered air to the music, you always feel in some way that you’ve intruded on some private party or some Sometimes the privacy threatens to overwhelm the music, making you wonder what is the point of recording it, like the beginning of Lucky 1, or 3 Umbrellas but there’s always some chorus of marvelous twist of melody that saves the day.
There’s some theme of an untamed and ghost-infested wilderness running through the LP, (with Ghost Cemeteries as a nice example)that recalls Blackwood or Fenimore-Cooper… subjects which the Animal Collective seem to have a great deal of sympathy with.
Low key, but diverting enough.