Painting With

Offerings of pure pop pleasure are offset with healthy doses of weirdness. It’s a sincere, exciting and excitable album that successfully adds by subtracting.

Painting With will not compare to Animal Collective’s most lauded work but these guys are forever experimentalists. This batch of songs is quicker and sunnier, something older fans are sure to despise. But what a great change of pace it is.

Overall, Painting With is a dizzying, lurid treat, almost too much to take in, craving its natural habitat. And it’ll really come alive out in the wild.

With every sound shoved forward in the mix, oodles of white space floats inbetween the sound-splats. Every moment is for the taking. Painting With marks an immediate, and physical new direction, and anything seems possible.

Undeniably great sounding, the record puts Animal Collective's brightest colors forward and, if history is any indication, is no predictor whatsoever of what they may do next.

Although the album revels in its sonic clutter (it’s remarkable how they can make percussive rhythms sound both primitive and absurdly futuristic), there are tracks scattered throughout to catch your breath.

Animal Collective’s latest sees them painting with confidence, acrylics, dinosaurs, Bob Ross, a twist, and a wipe out.

This is, after all, Animal Collective's attempt at stuffing a decade's worth of changing tastes into 12 disciplined, bite-sized songs. What's most impressive is that they accomplish this feat without ever letting accessibility compromise their individual preferences as artists, and vice versa.

Painting With is striking because it manages to distill the essence of Animal Collective into 12 slices of bite-sized psych-pop that have the punchy immediacy of a Ramones album. [Mar 2016, p.65]

There’s a time and place for material this demanding of the listeners’ attention, and it does take repeated listens for the album to really make sense, but when the mood fits, Painting Is hits the spot like only they can.

Animal Collective still lay down a challenge. It's the sound of a band refreshed.

Animal Collective is capable of crafting self-serious, masterful records; Painting With shows that the group is perhaps even better at making something meaningful when it loosens up.

All of the themes of Painting With converge to form a portrait of togetherness and encourage a shift of perspective. Panda and Avey preach on “Lying in the Grass” to “Try and approach/ The hidden picture.” Do so, and you’ll find that even in the album’s minimalism, there is plenty to enjoy and find worthwhile.

There are some striking, startling and sublime moments on Painting With, even if it is at times a little dis-jointed.

The result is Animal Collective at its tightest, most coherent and poppiest, even as the band draws on '60s psych/pop, rudimentary techno and three-chord punk to build on its ever-evolving sound. [No. 128, p.53]

The results are weirdly addictive and enjoyably absurd.

Part of what has made Animal Collective so revered is their disregard for traditional song structure and melody. They’re still testing those limits on Painting With, but the product rarely feels as groundbreaking.

In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

The confident, relaxed, but still concise and appealing “Vertical” indicates that Animal Collective still have some life in them, and as much as some of Painting With can tend to grate, it’s still an improvement from the band’s last two albums; trying to write pop songs instead of dance records or noise jams suits them in their middle age.

A record that has moments of brilliance but by virtue of trying to be a novelty record, actually comes closer to being a rehash of their previous work.

For sure, Animal Collective still have plenty of whimsical creativity left in them, but on Painting With they mostly color inside the lines.

All in all, Painting With feels just far too interpolated, and even familiar, to truly grasp, though through its failures it manages to somehow bring them one step closer to achieving those awe-inspiring moments of yore.

Painting With lacks the consistency to be that work, but its moments of glory provide a welcome return to the melodic mastery of golden ages past.

While working on the album, the band reportedly tried to blur the lines--primarily through scattershot vocals--to make it hard to discern who wrote what. In the process, they've lost the collaborative, intersectional sound that's always provided a sense of humanity heart at the centre of Animal Collective.

Inevitably there are moments when you wished they’d rein it in a little and take a breather from the very many sonic tricks they’re painting with. And you often can’t help but lament the lack of human compassion: the affecting and crafted songwriting of Merriweather Post Pavillion is somewhat lost. But there are glimpses of that capacity on Burglars which has some lovely Beach Boys-esque backing vocals, and many of the tracks are far more intoxicating than their previous record ever offered.

Painting With is unmistakably an Animal Collective album, but in its eager familiarity, it ultimately neglects the one all-important quality of any Animal Collective record: novelty.

Some tracks, though, aren’t actually as immediate as you would want them to be.

You’re left with an album on which smug self-indulgence is matched with genuine inventiveness. Painting With won’t change anyone’s mind about Animal Collective, or even help the undecided make theirs up.

If the absence of slow-builds and ambient drones makes for more succinct tunes, they're still no snappier. Choruses won't be bellowed, the air won't be bellowed, the air won't be punched, devotees will likely be delighted. [Mar 2016, p.105]

For all their organic methods, these Animals often come across so robotic and constricted--witness natural Selection's echoes of woozy Chicago house classic Washing machine--stripping those painstaking vocal arrangements of their humanity. [Mar 2016, p.94]

Full of punch, the album still never quite reaches its destination.

There's a sort of admirable purity to this approach, and it suggests that if Animal Collective decide they'd like to make brilliant albums again then probably will, but this time they're probably better off painting alone.

For all of its constant activity, [the album] feels stale. It does next to nothing new to build on previous releases, and from song to song there's so little variation that its ultimate effect is numbing. [Feb 2016, p.50]

Painting With is a record that just “is,” not very noteworthy, the band nowhere close to fulfilling its potential.