THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

"If you are really going to heaven, say a paternoster for me," says Guido as you leave behind the lustful at the last Cornice …

Animal Collective
Strawberry Jam
(Domino; 2007)
Rating: 9.6

According to John Milton, "Long is the way/ And hard that out of hell leads up to light." Animal Collective proves him wrong.

When I first heard about Animal Collective it was back in 2003 in an email from Johnny D who described the first song on Here Comes the Indian as the "sound of a couple of Ewoks that have just mounted a speeder (paraphrase)." I listened, hated, and gave it a 1.8 in an early jo-tel review. It seemed sort of like hell. Little did I know, it was.

After going for everything on their early, obscure Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, Panda Bear and Avey Tare, the Paul and John (respectively) of the collective, retreated, took stock, and hatched a hair-brained scheme just poppy enough to work: destroy all their progress and acquired skills and begin with themselves as embryos, young babies in the womb mimicking Brian Wilson by tapping out Here Comes the Indian on the placenta covered walls of their mother's uterus — then slowly pushing out, giving birth to themselves as the first fully developed pop/rock inventors since The Beatles.

Hip E. and I have often wondered and glorified how awesome it would have been to be a cognizant music fan in the 60s when you could go down to the corner store and buy Revolver or Sgt. Peppers before anyone even had a chance to weigh in on it and way before countless magazines would instruct you to consider these the best rock albums ever. Each new Beatles album was a frontier. To see that frontier expand in real time rather than retrospect must have been, we would note, sick.

Jack White recently claimed, "The Beatles set an impossible standard of reinventing themselves on each new album that everyone expects bands to live up (paraphrase)." To Mr. White I say: "Ahhhh, biscuits and gravy!" True, there was certainly an element of timeliness to the Beatles success. But it is a depressing aspersion against the vivacity of all current art to say that an artistic accomplishment of the past cannot be matched on its own terms. White is just justifying his own failures (i.e. the listless experimentation of Get Behind Me Satan).

In truth, the new frontiers are being forged away from major labels like RCA, which recently produced White's hit-and-miss Icky Thump. Because on Paw Tracks, Animal Collective followed up the guttural Here Comes the Indian with Sung Tongs. In retrospect, Sung Tongs was when we realized that the Animal Collective may have begun to induce its own birth, that they were maybe just temporarily befriending the demons of hell. The punchy pop of "Who Could Win a Rabbit" accenting the stripped down chants of "We Tigers" and the acoustic meandering of "Visiting Friends". But we still didn't really know what the fuck was going on.

When Feels was released, we thought we were given the answer. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson observed that, with Feels, "they seem on a pretty heady plateau (exact quote)." Indeed, the album felt like all pop, like the end of the journey. The discombobulated chants were now all employed in the service of happy melodies. The formless underworld of Here Comes the Indian, still seeded within studio manipulation-scapes like "Daffy Duck," seemed to merely accent the lustful heights of "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle".

In the end, Richardson was right to use "seem" in the above quotes. Feels was not the baby emerged, it was merely the head popping out — the moment when we realized the transformation was either here or inevitable. Strawberry Jam must be the birth that Feels presaged. Right? Instead of standing alone, that part on "The Bees" where it goes "THE BEES The Bees the Bees the beeees bwAHWAHAWHAHWHHHHHHHHHH" is now seamlessly woven into the thread of shout-alongs like "Fireworks" and "For Reverend Green" . Which is to say, the focus is always on the melodies on Strawberry Jam and they sound about as nice as the cooing of a someone else's new born child, especially on closer "Derek", which ran through my head so much a week ago that it was actually responsible for me enjoying a day of work.

If this is not the end of the road for the Collective's progression away from Here Comes the Indian, if we have not yet ascended upwards from the earthy heaven of Purgatory, then the world's pleasure receptors may just need to reorient themselves in anticipation of what's next. As it is, it seems like the Animal Collective has reimagined the concept of heaven and, unlike the boringly symmetrical and prayer-filled celestial globe of Dante's imagination, this one is actually fun.

You will not hear a better album this year.

'Turn, Beatrice, turn your holy eyes
upon your faithful one'–thus ran their song–
'who, to see you, now has come so far. …

My eyes were fixed and so intent
to satisfy ten years of thirst
that all my other senses were undone,

walled off from anything around them, enclosed
in their indifference, so did the holy smile
ensnare them in its old, familiar net[.]

-Purgatory (Canto XXXI, lines 112-118)

Download the entire album for free here: http://www.mediafire.com/?30v1ymyxuj1 (thanks to Merz for the link)

-Shark