Animal Collective - Here Comes the Indian 2003

Informed in equal parts by acid-fried psychosis, crop-circle field recordings, and an elephants-on-the-loose circus thrash aesthetic, Animal Collective's fourth full-length album rests roughly at the meeting point between psychedelic, noise, and folk music. Here Comes the Indian begins gently enough with "Native Belle," a moody set piece that belies the album's clatter with 12 minutes of constrained rhythmic builds, drones, and squeaks. Things quickly explode with the searing "Hey Light," a lightning bolt of electrocuted brass and human wails that sends the album careening into psychoactive delirium. Since everything that follows -- from the shrieking brattle of "Two Sails on a Sound" to the enchanted tribal vocal exercises of "Slippi" to the slow-building celebratory scuttle of "Too Soon" -- feels similarly crazed, drug-induced, and apparitional, Here Comes the Indian makes for particularly lucid listening. Brash, crass, and texturally magnificent, this is well worth seeking out. AMG.

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