Fall Be Kind EP
Release Date: 14/12/2009
You have to hand it to Animal Collective. Having crafted one of the most highly critically acclaimed albums of the year should be enough for any band, but the Baltimore trio seem more than keen to keep churning out new work. With a feature length film debuting at next month's Sundance festival and now this EP, it's been a prolific twelve months for a band that seems incapable of sitting still.
Notably, Fall Be Kind is far from simply Merriweather Post Pavilion: The Deleted Scenes. Rather, we are presented with a record yet more sprawling, more experimental and more genre-bending than its predecessor. The three highlights of the EP – 'Graze', 'What Would I Want? Sky', and 'I Think I Can' – are all distinguishable by their dichotomous structures; ambience and dream-like noise in the tracks’ first/second halves stands in contrast with melodic, catchy and often downright cute moments in the opposing halves to powerful effect (the pan flute loop in 'Graze' is enough to melt even the iciest of cynics’ hearts). It's a wonderful juxtaposition, and the other two tracks on the EP seem less memorable for their conventional linearness. They are by no means filler though; the brooding, reverb-laden 'On a Highway', suggests that Animal Collective have the potential to evolve yet again from their current state into something altogether darker.
A strong EP is a special and rare thing, even more so when it can be viewed as a separate entity to the album that preceded it: Fall Be Kind is just that. Animal Collective have successfully untethered themselves from their less accessible past but this EP proves that they remain a fearless and unique creative force in modern music.
9/10
By Thom Matthews
No comments:
Post a Comment