Animal Collective @ Koko via Ragged Words

Ragged Words

Hype is rarely a good thing, and this Ragged Words reviewer felt it badly. Animal Collective’s ninth studio album Merriweather Post Pavillion was new material to these ears, but the wonderful aspect of Panda Bear, Avey Tare and Geologist’s more soulful, poppy tracks is that they feel instantly familiar. And, tonight, so is the venue. AC played Koko only last May, and it appears that Camden feels like home for these fellows.

If there is a surprise element to this the first fixture of AC’s 2009 touring calendar, it’s that things start so slowly. ‘In The Flowers’ is something of a false dawn as the evening’s opener, Avey Tare gathers momentum with his signature jink and head bob but the pace just isn’t there. Sure, it’s gorgeous enough – the swelling of one note in particular pushes high, up and beyond the boxes of Koko’s amphitheatre – but it takes an hour before anything entirely interesting happens.

All complaints aside, all dropping of heads and gawping at watches, people reading text messages, twisting their necks to look up at Koko’s grand heights, it’s so worth the wait. The breakout begins with ‘Summertime Clothes’, that rampant synth loop is devastating in a live environment, the perfect intro for ‘Brother Sport’. Only one song – ‘Grass’ – has ever enraptured an AC concert like ‘Brother Sport’ does, fist-pumping and spot-hopping, finally! The trio disappear and return swiftly to perform Strawberry Jam’s superlative ‘Chores’, a skewered ‘Banshee Beat’, and perhaps the most addictive of Merriweather Post Pavillion’s hyped-tracks, ‘My Girls’. Everyone knows the words to this one – but the album only came out today, didn’t we all wait? Guess not.

It’s hard to feel let-down by Animal Collective’s slow approach tonight, because ‘Summertime Clothes’ and ‘Brother Sport’ swallowed up everything in that transient, numinous, words-failing kind of way. Thank God for Animal Collective.