Animal Collective - Painting With

Animal Collective
Painting With
2016
Spotify

With any Animal Collective record you can expect a heavy dose of weirdness. They live in a world where noises can turn into music and everyday life is fodder for some kind of song. The odder the sound the more they can craft something strangely melodic. This was the best part of early Animal Collective, that surprise at what they were doing. However with Panda Bear's fantastic album last year Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper this record really needed to go somewhere to set the band apart from what Panda was doing. It just didn't happen. Painting With is more of the same from Animal Collective, layered sounds, quirky rhythms and so on. That sense of shock that people are actually doing this type of music is simply gone and somehow their music became pedestrian. It may just be a bit of fatigue from their highly original sound but this record does not have the same pop. The brightness, the quirks and the experimentation are all still there but that connection that comes at a visceral level just seems to be missing. For real artists like Animal Collective Painting With comes across as more of a shadow of what they have done rather than the real deal.

Judging a band against themselves is always a tough road, but with Animal Collective because they are so distinct it is your only option. For Painting With it feels like Animal Collective went in knowing what an album of theirs should sound like and tried to do that rather than really going out there an exploring. The best song is also the shortest, "Spilling Guts", at only 1:58 but this is the track where you get that old sense of the band and feel like something special is happening. I don't know if Painting With is a sign of things to come or a potential slow down for the group, but it does feel like perhaps they are bored with the sound and are ready to move on. Sometimes it is hard to admit something is over, but in this case it does feel that way, or maybe I'm wrong and Animal Collective will come back with something incredible to blow our minds, only time will tell.

6.0 out of 10