Sung Tongs are tongs about returning to an old house, doing nothing with friends, or making sound with bones,’ the liner notes reveal. It’s also about sounding new without relying on new sound devices like computers or keyboards or even electric guitars, sticking instead to scattering myriads of vocals around songs with space in them, though the space is almost always full. Sung Tongs is also about hand claps and the familiararity of people’s voices and laughter and ooh’s and aah’s and whoop’s.
The poppiest and perhaps best song on the album being ‘Who Could Win a Rabbit’ is deceptive in that it reveals the album without explaining it. It being the second song and so strange sounding with its rolling drums and high-pitched dododo’s and lyrics about rabbit’s and habit’s, it doesn’t make Sung Tongs known as a record of songs longer than four minutes which take their time to swagger through, though rarely over stay their welcome. Animal Collective has a knack for multiplying exciting, pleasing noises which prevent the music from becoming mundane or derivative of itself.
The majority of instrumentation relies on vocals, a wealth of varied percussion, and acoustic guitars played with great interest and discernment. Collective oftentimes forgoes any sort of strumming and instead flick the strings up and down in varied rhythms. (As in ‘Good Lovin Outside,’ the somewhat eerie and tension-filled ‘Kids on Holiday,’ and the twelve minute opus ‘Visiting Friends.’) ‘The Softest Voice,’ among others, features the plucked strings of two guitars, one playing alongside musically but just behind in time to the other. The engaging and wonderful thing about Animal Collective is that one gets the sense that those guitars are actually being played in the same room with each other, and the guitarists are so familiar with each other that it is done with ease. Collective does not seem to rely on the wonders of digital musical editing to achieve their often psychedelic sound, but instead on the camaraderie of people making and playing music together.
Sung Tongs is often a gorgeous sounding album: the breathless pace of ‘Who Could Win a Rabbit,’ the warrior drums of ‘We Tigers,’ another standout song which announces the last third of the record with a invitation, a call to arms to come join the Tigers. Indeed, the entire album feels like an invitation, and not one to just antics and hijinks but to conversation and contemplation, seen to the utmost in the massive ‘Visiting Friends.’
‘Visiting Friends,’ unlike all of the other songs, doesn’t really change or progress, but wanders, more experimental than pop, though the same could be argued for the rest of the album. ‘Friends’ may also stand as the thesis for the album not only in use of Vocals That Sound Like Instruments (kind of like what Bjork’s Medulla seemed to want to offer but didn’t) but lyrically, as well, which is to say that Animal Collective are not too concerned with anyone understanding the lyrics or even caring that there are lyrics in there. Instead, they generally even the vocal volume with the rest of the song so that it does not stand out on its own, as a Voice with Something To Say. Perhaps the point of ‘The Softest Voice’ (another song with sporadic and circular vocals) and the record entire is that the softest voice is unintelligible. That ‘making sound with bones’ is all that is needed in way of message.
There are the hints at influences along the way: the breathing vocals in “Who Could Win a Rabbit’ are reminiscent of the Beatles’ ‘Lovely Rita’ and many of the songs on Magical Mystery Tour; the Beach Boys are brought to mind with ‘College,’ Collective sounding like prep school boys in letter sweaters. ‘College’ also calls to mind, with its use of the ever-popular eggs-crackling-on-a-skillet sound, Pink Floyd’s ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ and the ‘This is your brain on drugs,’ commercials. Of course, the sound of eggs-crackling can bring thousands of different instances to mind – recorded or otherwise – which is Sung Tongs strongest suit: it’s ability to sound instant and spontaneous while also historical and matured. |