Animal Collective – Sung Tongs

I don’t really know what to call the sort of abstract folk music Animal Collective makes. I do know that, since Avey Tare and Panda Bear released its first album in 2000, the Animal Collective and its members have been responsible for some of the best and most interesting music of this young millennium. Sung Tongs might be the collective’s best album yet. It might be one of the best albums of the year. It might even be the album that lets the clenched fist of your life relax enough to allow in the love of another. Or it might just be a record I like for a couple weeks and then forget about. I don’t know. I do know that, right now, I’m finding Sung Tongs to be a fairly amazing piece of work. And as far as folk music goes, Animal Collective destroys all the old new Dylans.

Sung Tongs picks up the vestigial traces of folk music previously glimpsed in the Animal Collective’s oeuvre and constructs a cohesive whole. More so than Here Comes the Indian, Sung Tongs is made up of songs more than music, making use of the Collective’s experimentalism in a slightly more straight-forward fashion. Instead of being abstractions of the idea of music, the songs on Sung Tongs are abstractions of the idea of songs. The band sings real words, words you can frequently understand, as on “Kids on Holiday,” and the words attain a degree of significance lacking in the band’s older work. Still, the emphasis is not on the words as much as it is on the music that surrounds them. The words are less important than sounds, or the idea of words, or maybe the sound of the idea of words as sounds.

Listen to “Visiting Friends,” for instance. Vague whispers and murmurs of lyrics float in and out amidst a hazy water cloud of unearthly folk strumming. The occasional word jumps out and lets itself be known – I can hear a “window” in there somewhere – but for the most part the lyrics are purposefully buried enough to be largely incomprehensible. Immediately after “Visiting Friends” comes “College” and its Beach Boys style harmony. Again, a wordless melody, beautiful and haunting, and imparting the idea of singing but without using much actual language. The tribal chanting of “We Tigers” contains some obviously English words, but is mostly a chorus of gibberish and drumbeats, sounding not unlike an Andy Kaufman skit. The songs on Sung Tongs are most definitely songs, but stretched and skewed in a way to make them barely recognizable as such.

But all this would be worthless bullshit if the songs didn’t sound good. Fortunately, they more than meet this requirement. The disjointed folk music on Sung Tongs sounds like the swell of the ocean and the rustle of the sacred wood, the foam of the magical lather, the cream of destiny. This could be the Incredible String Band with laser guitars, or Simon and Garfunkel if they could levitate. Animal Collective is a mythical James Taylor. These are campfire songs played as an underwater blur. These songs are right.

One’s attention could easily be transfixed by the Animal Collective and its Sung Tongs. These timeless paeans to the unknowable past, the ancient power of imagination and invention, stand as a mighty testament to the artistic and creative impulses implicit within us all. Or maybe they just sound really good through these headphones. I don’t know. I do know that Sung Tongs truly is a great album from a fantastic band, a band that sounds like the Godz hanging with the Incredible String Band and the Danielson Familie. Sung Tongs is fascinating contemporary folk music, made by smart-asses posing as spaced out medieval hippies. Or maybe vice versa.