Animal Collective - Time Skiffs Review
Never mind nihilism, float in the river of ever-changing meaning with finally resurfaced Baltimore best.
Animal Collective has this tendency to indulge in a decade-lasting process of experimentations before they’ll formulate something substantial enough. Enough to not only satisfy the closest-clinging fans but something that would be like an avantgarde-pop asteroid smashing almost on our heads to leave a mark for the next few years. It’s what happened when after tumbling around niche alleyways, they’ve stepped in ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion. When literally everyone around has noticed how splendid it is, Animal Collective could never quite build something as simply astounding as this. Until now. Followed by a few awkward album-long trips of last years’ records, Animal Collective has finally found the right track to take us along on this strangely ecstatic journey. The collective meets us at the crossroads with their eleventh studio album ‘Time Skiffs’.
We find the way to the main road with fire-breathing ‘Dragon Slayer’, an ambiguously slow-burning cymbal-introducing teaser of destruction and resurrection to come. What’s special about ‘Time Skiffs’ is that every song is like a new station, opening up a fresh landscape before us but at the same time adding to the existing picture. It’s hard to declare love to one as we fall again and again with the next ones. Whether it’s flowing in expansive harmonies, moment-affirming ‘Strung with Everything’, as if Beach Boys with an added flair met Grateful Dead; wild-eyed and wide-road Animal Collective’s new captivating classic ‘Cherokee’; ‘Walker’ a just-before-take-off kind of track and a tribute to Scott Walker or gently-expanding, in The Flaming Lips’ fashion, ‘Prester John, inspired by a mythical medieval ruler who Animal Collective made face an existential crisis. It’s a grand piece in its intelligent lyricism.
Animal Collective fights nihilism like no one. It’s done with such grace and nonchalance that makes us actually willing to believe that if we go with the flow of this river, there’ll be salvation. The collective dressed their boat in thousands of wind chimes and sweetly stretched melodies so we can’t just walk past. As if enchanted by sirens Odysseus, we stand still listening to what the songs captured in waves got to say.
‘Time Skiffs’ is indeed an exquisite outward but its qualities go way beyond sonic-based pleasing. Most of us live in the reality where we let our shadows feast on scraps and became scared of the direct sun, accepting social media and fast-food quantity-leaden, artificial light. Animal Collective effortlessly steers your sight into the meadows of a subconscious that’s blissful in the acceptance of ever-constant fluidity, content with the given. If ‘No More Runnin’s mood was an album, it’s this one. Only, like ‘Royal and Desire’ eludes, ‘The way to love like a child/To always see what he chase/But it never holds how, how?’, this time we will keep on chasing the rabbit. It doesn’t matter if we fall in the black-pitch hole or find a wonderland. There’s magic to idealizing an unreachable dream.