Talking About Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam
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Through A Child’s Eyes: Talking About Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam Chance Lytle 7 May 2018 What makes an album is messily drumming your fingers out of step with a beat down a highway; splicing segments of it into a mix CD with poorly drawn, bootleg art; mishearing lyrics for years and laughing at realizations. These parts mature with you, different chunks randomly rising to the surface, developing an impression of the whole. When played straight through, albums can create an organic, bubbly mix of all the manufactured memories surrounding them. The noticed changes in loving and listening to it layer with the nostalgia of the original emotions surrounding it. Yet, the refractions of what’s heard can be radically different from what went into it. Animal Collective cram new takes on their age-old themes and fresh synths and samples into a tight, mason jar prism to make as perfect a pop album as you can get. STRAWBERRY JAM is abstract and personal to the point where it risks sinking in its gooey depths, but it remains optimistic, hopeful. A near-decade of transcribing nostalgia toward childhood and fantasy lead up to its place as a transitional record, focused on the band’s new, immediate present. By the time its first tracks debuted live in October 2005, Panda Bear had moved across the Atlantic. Avey Tare had started performing with Kría Brekkan the summer before. Geologist had just finished graduate studies. Deakin was soon to take a breather after the tour. The band had put out an album a year since 2000, but 2006 was the first one they missed. With tour dates still being consistently booked, it is evident that new responsibilities and livelihoods weren’t dividing them, only changing their output. Like a growth spurt ending, the thrashing of the band’s rapid, experimental album releases pushed through acoustic sounds then electric then electronic to come to a head with STRAWBERRY JAM. It was their last album to feature guitars. After release, Avey bandied that their sound had become so different with newly attentive synths, samples, and twisted strings that they rename themselves The Painters, but was met with some eye rolls. It’s hard to say when someone reaches adulthood, enough to be confident in a lasting name and skin, but STRAWBERRY JAM is Animal Collective’s last inch cut into the doorframe. It harmonizes the individual voices of each member, now spread across two coasts and inside mushrooming family trees, into yet another passionately different direction, but unprecedently one they would stick to up until THE PAINTERS EP, a revival of that earlier name. Impeccably showcasing the empathetic unity learned throughout their release history, the album is a highway interchange of all the members’ new lives, twisted into a pretzel over each other. The union they set out to create comes from a similar place as the title. The album is named after the sharply futuristic but natural-feeling bits in a strawberry jam packet on an airplane; the album throws synthesizers and samples into the band’s established, organic production standards. Every song has an underlying repetition, seemingly machined and automatic but with human inconsistencies. The noise added complexity to mixing the subtler auxiliary instruments and backing vocals. The double- helix songs reach to a deeper core than the comparatively more stripped-down albums, but took effort to maintain a level drill head. The band still refers to it as the hardest to 1 mix while trying to maintain an amalgamated sound. On FEELS, they had difficulty balancing piano and unused mandolin contributions with the new electrics, always focusing on that “one organic sound.” Sun City Girls engineer Scott Colburn was tapped for his experience. Blending together their past of noise and drone sketches and keeping on Colburn provided the organization necessary to keep STRAWBERRY jamming. In the desert heat of Tucson, Arizona, they baked every channel into the whole they wanted. No part apparently overlays another; at worst, accent parts bubble up unexpectedly, but like globs of fruit hidden in otherwise smooth jam, they are the best parts. The album’s cyclic approach reveals new texture on each chunk with each pass. The small deviations in rolls and sounds that give the synthetic album this human edge were carefully laid and developed. They give off an air of improvisation and live performance even in mastered studio recordings. Unlike previous albums, three songs were not played live prior to release: “Unsolved Mysteries,” “Winter Wonder Land,” and “Derek.” Together with “Chores,” “Mysteries” and “Winter” form the childlike cornerstone of the album. They draw from the band’s oft-visited wells to ground and mellow out the record’s overall progression to adulthood. During live shows of the era, they were thrown together with live installments of the also erratic and sentimental “We Tigers,” “Daffy Duck,” and “Kids on Holiday.” Animal Collective never abandon the sound and lyricism they grew up with, but always present it in a new, current light, be it with the benefit of hindsight or longing. “Unresolved Mysteries” laments the imaginary mysteries of a child’s world left as hanging threads through chopped up rhythms, while “Chores” revels in the undying wish to escape responsibility. The importance of giving oneself up to the past is never lost, 2 just remembered and savored differently. Memories of fun and love end up driving life’s progression just as much as the challenges of the present. These songs are an olive branch between childhood and adulthood. Despite crossing the line to the latter, there are always fossils and gems to be found in “the dinosaur wing” of life’s museum. “Peacebone” warns of getting lost in there, but still stresses the importance of cherishing the “few things…related to the ‘old times’.” As the album opener, it lies bare the album’s theme of transition by throwing away attachment to the way things have been for trusting what’s inside: the same imagination that has always been there. By solidifying their respect for chosen parts of the past, the band can tackle others to the ground. The stretch from “Reverend Green” through “Fireworks” to “#1” is the heart of the album’s progression. The songs coagulate the album’s different make-up, setting it apart from FEELS’ present-tense moments of love and loss or HERE COMES THE INDIAN’s crayon-scribbled yelps. Maintaining the cyclic underpinnings of the rest of the album, “Green” takes a guitar mangled with shifted pitch, tremolo, and distortion into a riot of voices. The isolation of fairy tales in screened-in porches dissolves in a free-for- all of societal angst that expresses an empathy matured beyond anything before. More than wild animals or spirits, the vocals are, at last, surrounded by people and ideas of as intense emotion as themselves. For me, the song finally clicked with a mondegreen. Mishearing “I think it's alright they're together \ Now” signaled with a burning sign how stubborn and pointless it was to close off someone from a life they cared about. The world we live in is connected by more than “touches [to] breasts;” it’s “alright” to lapse and “feel inhuman” from time to time if the possible depth of all humans is learned. The “papers” or standards don’t “know what’s best,” the sincerity is always in us, clashing 3 and coming together both on a raw level. The vocal bridge emboldens virtues that have been sung about in every past album, children and their guiltless perspectives, but only now are looked at reflectively in a time where they risk being forgotten rather than unembodied. The childlike ease of connection should never be lost even when fearing the canyons that can divide us. Play dates give way to “a thousand wasted Brooklyners” in the streets, a new exchange of life with all the intensity of the past. The song’s riot of doubled chords on the pavement and the collective mirror it forces up are send-ups of the ideals of the manic forest dances and creative ferment of the band’s New York and Baltimore. They’re surprised at what can happen so close to home, closer than imagined lands and beings. All that needs to be done is connect the worlds of urban bystanders to refresh emotions worn down by the times, emotional heights still attainable after “a shifting” and weathering a riot against the hardships of society and perspective. The riot screeches and breaks down to staccato drops of rain in a torrent, a pitter- patter drumline growing into a new song. The guitar revives the FEELS era slap-back to revisit “Banshee Beat”-style love. The vocal blooms express a melancholy acknowledging the long time that has passed since last seeing love “from the night from before.” Flashbacks and flashforwards collide amid the consistent, droning drumbeat. “Fireworks” earns a welcome departure of ego following young love as the speaker grows to treat themselves and their former partner as individuals after and above a misshapen relationship. The speaker can step outside the relationship they were once drowning in and separate the partner from the once-shared love to let them both thrive. The latter is no longer unnecessarily “lifted up” by “tired” repetition but now able to exist, to the speaker, individually as they are. The song’s narrative begins with the break- 4 up still crystallizing, creating an imagined shelter from the fallout with the first verse’s future tense. In early live iterations, “Fireworks” was reworked into a suite with an interlude of “Essplode” between the bridge, combining the furtive, sunbaked dream of watching summer fireworks with a callback to regressed senses of honey butter air, fucking together, a blanket melee—when it was simple.