Review: Avey Tare - Down There

The transition of Animal Collective from experimentalists confined to indie-blogdom to mainstream acceptance and acclaim, confirmed by the success of last year's Merriweather Post Pavilion, was the result of 10 years of honing their sound, writing more tangible and accessible songs and melodies, whilst  refusing to their boundary-pushing vision. What has also developed in that time, however, is a more personable side to chief members Dave Portner (Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox's (Panda Bear) songwriting. On A Highway, from last year's Fall Be Kind EP, contained Tare's most bitterly frank lyrics to date, "I'm sick from too much reading/ jealous of Noah's dreaming/ can't help my brain from thinking", catching him in deep thought whilst on tour with the band.

Whilst Lennox can't help but let beams of sunshine radiate from even his most melancholic songs, Tare is more prone to subvert and disorientate, so it's no surprise that Tare's first solo LP (not counting the back-to-front nonsense of his Pullhair Rubeye project with ex-wife Kria Brekkan) is a rather more dark and personal affair than we've come to expect from his day job. Tare has mentioned in interviews about its swampy theme and feel, relating to the crocodile skull on the cover, and so the album retains the watery feel of AC's most recent work. But whilst Merriweather's booming, cushy percussion was akin to bouncing off a giant marshmallow, Down There's clicks knocks and gurgles sound hollow and anaemic by comparison (save for the bass-drum beat on Heads Hammock). There's a murkiness to the album as a whole, far removed from the crystallinity of recent AC releases; songs are permeated by sinister, aquatic voices, and on a number of tracks Tare's vocals become submerged, only to re-surface again, as if something is continually pulling him under the murk and scum.

Down There opens with two of its more immediate offerings. The seven minutes of Laughing Hieroglyphic are relatively light and airy, thanks to its reverberating accordian, but still offers insight into Tare's mind-set ("and when I get f*cked up/ I do my best to make myself not f*cked up again"), whilst the ayyy-ohhhh backing vocals and twinkling carnival organ of 3 Umbrellas makes it the most AC-sounding thing here. But the subsequent warped textures of Oliver Twist and instrumental Glass Bottom Boat pull the album under, where it remains for most of its duration. The album's finest song, Heather In The Hospital, is also its saddest and most auto-biographical, as Avey Tare overviews his sister's recent battle with cancer over throbbing heart-beat percussion. As he sits in the hospital, he's visited by what seem to be ghosts or maybe personal demons ("Someone's in the room listening to me/ noone's in the room it must just be me") but even at his lowest ebb, Tare maintains this sense of wide-eyed wonder of the happenings around him; "It brings me down/ machines of modern magic keeping folks above the ground". The closing Lucky 1, which seemed somewhat slight as a lead cut, works much better within the context of the album, offering a hopeful hand to pull us out of its depths.

Those who arrived at Animal Collective off the back of the hype for Merriweather Post Pavilion might want to approach Down There with some degree of caution, or even hold out for Panda Bear's Tomboy which hangs just on the horizon. Down There is a wilfully more initimate and low-key affair, but none of this should be taken as criticism; Down There reminds us that these animals have very human traits after all.

77/100