Animal Collective w/Black Dice
Celebrate Brooklyn! at Prospect Park Bandshell
Tuesday, July 12

Better than: Sweating at home alone.

Animal Collective has usually been categorized by its two primary creative forces: Avey Tare and Panda Bear. Sure, Deakin and Geologist are important (and perhaps more important than the other two if you're only talking about the live show), but it's not uncommon to judge a group by its singers. Normally, Avey and Panda split vocal and lyrical duties; however, at last night's Prospect Park Bandshell show, the sweaty crowd was treated to the Avey Tare Experience, Featuring Three Other Dudes. This is not a bad thing: Avey's aesthetics, both lyrically and vocally, translate to the live setting better than Panda's woozy drone tracks. But seeing Panda Bear relegated to harmonies and drums was unexpected.

More »

People have lots of strong opinions about the musical outfit that goes by the name Animal Collective, and expect those comment-section arguments to rage now that the band has taken it upon itself to tour this summer. (Brooklyn Vegan's already lighting up! Can someone get me some hummus?) So far they've announced a single New York date, a Celebrate Brooklyn! benefit taking place on the evening of July 12 at the Prospect Park Bandshell. Tickets to the show go on presale at noon today, and are $40.80 with fees; the rest of you can get your tickets beginning Friday at noon.

More »

Say what you want about Animal Collective's recent turn as wedding music for the shrillest people alive, they will probably always have a better record collection than you. To wit: The line-up for May's AnCo-curated All Tomorrow's Parties Festival in Minehead, England just added OutKast funkateer Big Boi and minimalism's blissmaster general Terry Riley in the same day. No word on whether Poppy Nogood and Sir Lucious Left Foot are gonna jam out on some indotrancealisticadillacmuzik, but with that news we're pretty much ready to hop on a plane--even if it means spending a weekend avoiding facepaint stains from AnCo's most fanatical, make-upped followers. General Patton and Terry also join an already double-stuffed lineup including the reborn masters of avant-clank Thinking Fellers Union 282, Saharan guitar masters Group Doueh, Atlas Sound, Gang Gang Dance, Meat Puppets, The Frogs, Vlasislav Delay and like the entire Paw-Tracks roster. Basically, if you like putting terrible things in your body and then rapidly sweating them out in a tiger mask, boy do we have a weekend for you. Full, totally batshit ridiculous line-up--including 12 new additions--after the jump.

More »

Making the rounds this week is a New York Magazine article entitled "What Was the Hipster?" Written by n+1's Mark Greif, the piece is meant as a critical history of an era pegged to have lasted just 10 years, from 1999 to 2009. The moment supposedly began with the move of Vice magazine from Montreal to New York and the founding of the sneaker store A-Life (?!), and came to end sometime last year, with the advent of the book Look at This Fucking Hipster and Dov Charney's repudiation, earlier this year, of the word "hipster" itself. These wobbly bookends contain, in Grief's history, two periods of the hipster: one he deems the "White Hipster"--trucker hats, PBR, racism, mustaches--and one called the "Hipster Primitive," that familiar figure in recent memory, a man with a beard and a McSweeney's subscription and a penchant for listening to Animal Collective. (Also: a woman in Wellington boots.) You will be as shocked as we were to learn that both Pitchfork, led by the cheerful Midwesterner Ryan Schreiber, and Fleet Foxes, a band that looks and sounds like this, were some of the more prominent avatars of The Hipster's second and more current wave.

More »

"Does that mean I have a massive ego? Is there something wrong with that?" asks Panda Bear, a/k/a Noah Lennox, about his latest conquest as a solo artist. Though Lennox is the soaring, helium-voiced member of the ubiquitous Animal Collective and the man responsible for one of the most praised albums of the decade -- the jubilant, loop-heavy Person Pitch -- we tell him that he's no Kanye when it comes to arrogance. "I've never been to an award ceremony, so you never know," he warns. "If you let me loose in that zone, I'm going to go crazy."

Hopefully, this day never comes. Currently recording his fourth album, Tomboy, and preparing for a set at Governors Island this Saturday, Panda Bear chatted us with about the solo artist's ego, inner conflict within the new record, and, out of all people, how Frank Sinatra and Bach are among his influences.

More »

Were we all aware that this existed, the Williamsburg Salsa Orchestra? That it "plays big Latin arrangements of some of the best indie music"? And what better way to announce yourself than by tackling the best indie-music song of all time? Ridiculous a concept as this may be, once it gets going (four minutes in or so) it sounds... markedly less ridiculous. No shows scheduled yet, but they've got a few other tunes up, including a version of TVOTR's "Wolf Like Me" that's even more bonkers:

More »

When Animal Collective's winsome pop collides with Philly-based video artist Danny Perez, odd shit occurs. Perez has a knack for sussing out the band's darkness. Take Perez's first collaboration with the group, for 2004's breakout indie pop single, "Who Could in a Rabbit." Tangentially a video updating of the tortoise and hare race, it devolves into shocking cannibalism by song's end. And for last year's "Summertime Clothes," Perez paired that MPP song's sweet summertime stroll with throbbing flesh pod dancers right out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

More »

An AC/Danny Perez co-production, just to give you a taste of what you're in for.

Oh yes. Animal Collective, partnering with longtime visual-arts cohort Danny Perez for a one-night-only deal Thursday, March 4. Per the Goog: "For the Guggenheim's 50th Anniversary, the band Animal Collective has collaborated with artist Danny Perez on a site-specific performance piece that will transform the museum's rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment. Transverse Temporal Gyrus will feature original recorded music composed specifically for the work along with video projections, costumes, and props, rendering the band members and performers into intense, visual abstractions."

So then. Tix on sale tomorrow for members, Friday for the unwashed masses. Objective, short version: to "unite this room of sound with the inside of your brain." The long version, per the boys themselves, after the jump. Good luck.

More »

Did you somehow doubt that the alien-spatter electronics of Animal Collective could be performed by actual humans, as opposed to bits of broken and tie-dyed machinery? Wrong! Thanks to Momo & the Coop, an a cappella group comprised of Lewis & Clark students, AC's "Leaf House" has been successfully funneled through vocal chords. The result is a mosh of convulsing collegiate torsos, gleefully harmonizing Ave Tare's mid-song monkey screech before settling on a chordal interpretation of the ending "meows." A noble attempt to bridge the seemingly disparate realms of Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, indeed. Now imagine if these guys teamed up with Cornell's steel drum group:

More »

Party-A-Day

Shirley, left, at a Crown Heights party: "OMGDZZZ its PEGGY FROM THE PAINS. also mark monnone (from the lucksmiths doy!) havent seen this bro in ages."

Shirley Braha is the producer of NY-TV's reliably stellar local-music-video show New York Noise. But since last fall, she's also been preoccupied with updating her blog Party-A-Day, which you'd be forgiven for mistaking as a big-box store chain that trafficks in noiseblowers and paper doilies. Not so, Party-A-Day is tongue-and-cheek project born of autumnal boredom that has Braha documenting all the convivial (and some not so) gatherings she's attended since this past September, including the Beggars/Matador holiday soiree to the Fever Ray post-show shindig, and Todd P's Punkin' Carvin' Party. But NYC's "Best local music groupie" has also reliably ventured outside her own wheelhouse, like say, to a dog-costume celebration, a "big gay house party," and a Canal Street rooftop fete with directions on where to do coke:

More »