Painting With
Dizzyingly upbeat and gloriously realized, Painting With bounces and pops with an urgent, ecstatic energy, confirming Animal Collective's status as one of the finest experimental electronic bands around.
Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of Animal Collective's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. It 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.
Animal Collective’s music has always boasted a certain amount of impenetrability. Even the albums that lean more heavily on folk music tropes come with a set of barriers that keep the listener at an arm’s length. That’s not to say that the band’s music can’t be moving—Merriweather Post Pavillion exudes great joy…
In a world where you can see the colour of gravitational waves, an album like Painting With is not out of place – it’s a work of great weight and a masterpiece of colour.
Animal Collective don’t need to prove anything. They have a very strong case for being the best band of the 2000s
Wielding the lineup of Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), and Geologist (Brian Weitz) -- the same as on their most popular LP to date, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion -- beloved indie experimenters Animal Collective show no signs of dulling with age on their tenth long-player, Painting With.
Baltimore's foremost avant-garde popsters return with their focus renewed; Painting With is duly their best effort since 2009's Merriweather Post-Pavilion.
Reportedly inspired by the Ramones, early Beatles recordings, Cubism, Dadaism, and (most bizarre of all) dinosaurs, Painting With finds Mary...
Animal Collective's career is a strange one. There was a time in the very recent past that a new album would have sent a section of the Internet—and I dare say it's a section that would have crossed over heavily with Under the Radar's readership—into
It can be argued that Animal Collective have one of the most steadfast and divisive discographies around. Since their inception in 1999 and bar maybe one
Although they’ve gone ‘accessible’, the veteran psychedelic experimentalists are still pretty weird
For both its earnest, uninhibited sense of play and impeccable pop, Animal Collective's 'Painting With' is a uniquely affecting album.
'Painting With' by Animal Collective, album review by Gregory Adams, Animal Collective's full-length comes out on February 19th via Domino Records.
Baltimore’s most admired and reviled band deliver a new album that is undoubtedly inventive, and at times weirdly satisfying – but almost supernaturally annoying as well
Art-related conceptual pop is full of colour but lacks depth of perspective. CD review by Matthew Wright