“Water Curses” opens Animal Collective’s new EP with a song as great as anything the band has put out to date. A catchy carnival ride of swishing synths, acoustic guitars, and bubbly electronic sounds, the song illustrates everything that’s great about the avant popsters: schizophrenic vocal lines jumping intervals during a rapid delivery of lyrics, summery falsetto harmonies, and skipping organ and electronics. The song is more musically complex than anything on last year’s Strawberry Jam, but at least as catchy and even more emotionally charged, illustrating the band’s willingness to challenge itself. It’s also a great opener to an album that features some of Animal Collective’s most ambitious and focused work—music that shows a great band getting even better.
As a whole, Water Curses shows a significant growth in the band’s compositional skills and musicianship. Like their previous work, the music relies heavily on sonic manipulations and “found sound” elements in the vein of dub or sample-based music. On Water Curses, however, composition takes an equally large role, making it so that the songs really go somewhere. In the case of both “Street Flashes” and “Cobwebs,” the music moves towards peaks, giving a sense of compositional arc and direction.
In “Street Flashes,” Avery Tare’s delay-heavy voice jumps between falsetto and chest voice over what sounds like a hypnotic texture of churning gears and seagulls. Between eruptions of maniacal laughter, he gently delivers processed, indecipherable vocals. The song reaches its peak four minutes in, when his voice rises to a scream, contrasting with the still sedate hypnotism and chirping electronics of the backing track.
“Cobwebs” is a gorgeous, dark piece that combines minimalist hits of metallic percussion, reverb-y guitar work, and what sounds like a sample of a jet landing. Falsetto vocals delicately weave around Tare’s voice, which declares, “I’m not going underground” over ambient electro beeps and swelling synths. The composition slowly builds towards the ecstatic explosions of close vocal harmonies of the song’s climax, creating a simultaneously emotional and serene psychedelic sound.
On the EP’s closing piece, “Seal Eyeing,” somber vocals describe seals swimming in melting ice over a pensive minimalist piano line and gurgling electronics. The song, an apocalyptic vision describing the death of the environment, is perhaps the band’s most beautiful and serious work to date. A truly touching piece of music that momentarily casts away the usual fun and silliness of Animal Collective’s previous work, the song illuminates the band in a new light—one of a group willing to dip into the darker side of world issues and create something truly contemplative and meaningful.
With the exception of the title song, the Water Curses EP draws more on the serene textural approach heard on band member Panda Bear’s last solo excursion, Person Pitch, than it does the bouncing beats of Strawberry Jam. At the same time, while Person Pitch concentrated on hypnotic, reverb-y textures that often assumed the role of mood music, Water Curses retains the more present and aggressive vocal delivery and sonic palate of Animal Collective’s previous work—a sound that refuses to become background music. Water Curses shows an already great band on the rise and is hopefully a tantalizing tease of what to expect on their next full-length release. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that what’s coming is as good as what’s here.
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