Animal Collective’s Fall Be Kind begins like a fantastic dream-like trance that soaks you into it’s folds. “Graze” is almost a musical to begin with (as in Joseph and his Technicoloured Dreamcoat musical), but obviously not in any real way. Then, just as you think you’re getting used to that, synthesised pipes blast out a tune somewhere between medieval and carnival and again you’re sort lost in a weird dream. However, when the lyrics come back in sounding a bit like Vampire Weekend, with Notting Hill Carnival beats, it all somehow makes sense.
Then you’re shunted back into a lull with the beginning of “What would I want to say? Sky”, but like before it doesn’t last and when you snap out of it with the change of direction half way through the song, it’s like waking up to your favourite radio station on a stunning summer Sunday morning (the one’s with a bank holiday Monday propping them up).
With darker, almost monastic moments in “Bleed” receding to the hazy drive of “On a Highway” followed by the stunningly surreal, positivist, but questioning “I Think I Can”, Fall Be Kind is a complex and hypnotic beast.
In Fall Be Kind Animal Collective have produced the most interesting EP I’ve heard all year. Maybe I’m overstating it because I’m a late comer to the Animal Collective collective, but it’s the kind of EP that ends too quickly if you’re not paying attention and you can’t stop yourself from listening to it all again.
That’s what makes it so great for making the time go quickly in work. I listened to it all day today and hardly noticed a thing around my. I was in a trance, a blur against the background of the office trudge. It was weird, I didn’t even notice doing work, but it somehow got done, as though the Animal Collective were doing it for me.
Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind EP review: 4/5
