With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour and get a preview of the album to come in their live show, but aside from that, it's difficult to tell which direction their music will go next. If you'd heard Spirit They're Gone or Danse Manatee you could possibly have predicted the more difficult and abstract direction of Here Comes the Indian but you wouldn't have guessed they'd make something like Campfire Songs around the same time; if you'd heard the latter you'd might hazard a guess about Sung Tongs but Feels wouldn't necessarily strike you as the work of the same band.
That said, the newly released Feels is not a total departure from Sung Tongs, and it actually tracks it quite closely in terms of the album's structure. It's apparent from the first few bars of "Did You See the Words" that A.C. begins in "song" mode, setting aside for the moment the soundscaping that defined the earlier records. The first spin is a tad disconcerting because, with its electric guitar and more trad band set-up, Animal Collective sound for the first time like what they've always been to detractors with more outré tastes: an indie rock band. The songs proceed with a logic that has more to do with the early experiments of Mercury Rev than say, Sebadoh, but where Animal Collective previously sounded as if they were working according to an unusual set of rules, the first half of Feels exists in relationship to music history, and not just any music history, but rock.
I hear the ghosts of 1950s artists like Buddy Holly inside more straightforward pop songs "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle". On "Grass", the reverb on Avey Tare's voice adds a hiccup to every syllable and the guitar is processed to sound at times like the rollicking boogie-woogie piano rhythm. Of course, 50 years ago no one would have made a chorus out of loud, clipped screams synchronized to bashed drums (well, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis), and the conversational vocal harmony breakdown of "The Purple Bottle" jumps ahead a decade to a highly psychedelicized Beach Boys. Such moments are why the adolescent unpredictability of Animal Collective is such an asset-- they're able to tap into the narrative of Western pop while making it their own.
Like Animal Collective's previous full length, Feels is sequenced carefully, with jauntier, tuneful numbers leading to an amorphous back half. The two transitional songs in the record's middle, "Bees" and "Banshee Beat", are among the best things Animal Collective has done. "Bees" imagines how a drifting pop song might sound inside the sonic universe of an Alice Coltrane album, with a trebly autoharp that is all strings and no body and sustained clusters of piano that bring to mind an ascension through clouds. "Banshee Beat" is even better. Animal Collective's signature approach to composition-- in which open chords are strummed repeatedly for longer than seems necessary to create a unique sense of tension relieved only by vocal chants and howls-- finds its apotheosis over these eight minutes. "Daffy Duck" is a further exploration of the ideas presented on "Bees", and "Loch Raven" is an uncharacteristically tender electro-acoustic lullaby, vaguely Aphexian in the way it mixes sine wave drones with a simple piano line and a cluster of wordless voices.
The upbeat "Turn Into Something" brings the album back to where it started. Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time. But it's also interesting to contemplate as a chapter in the Animal Collective story. If the childhood pals can stay friends and continue to inspire each other we may have some more great records down the road. At the moment they seem on a pretty heady plateau, but you don't get the idea listening to Feels that they've said nearly all they have to say.
