7s
Animal Collective co-frontperson Avey Tare’s music is what you might get if you crossed a ’60s singer-songwriter with the hermetic sound-sculpting of a hip-hop or techno producer. Started during the pandemic isolation of 2020, *7s* touches on bossa nova (“Lips at Night”), pop funk (“The Musical”), and the wobbly beats of British dance music (“Hey Bog”) with a sense of wonder and omnivorousness that has always made his and his band’s music special. It also highlights his capacity to tweak every little fragment of audio—human, synthetic, and otherwise—into a shape just beyond recognition. And like the psychedelic states it obliquely invokes, the album’s gentleness is offset by the threat of something perpetually lurking at its periphery, whether it’s the dissonance of “Cloud Stop Rest Start” or the haze lingering over “Sweeper’s Grin.” Avey Tare has never been an artist to listen to for lyrics, but take heed to the implications of what he says on “The Musical”: He doesn’t write songs; he makes sound.
During the first week of Jan '21, Avey Tare began making regular drives to his friend Adam McDaniel’s Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, NC to give guts and flesh and color to the skeletal demos he’d made at home the year prior. The plot for 7s, Avey’s fourth solo album, was set: trusting, intuitive, exploratory collaboration among friends, after a Winter without it. These songs are like overstuffed jelly jars, cracking so that the sweetness oozes out into unexpected shapes. Still, the sweetness—that is, Avey’s compulsory hooks—remains at the center, the joy inside these Rorschach blots. If Animal Collective has forever been defined by its charming inscrutability, Avey surrenders to a new intimacy and candor with 7s.
Rooted in demos made early in the pandemic, Avey Tare’s fourth solo album is unusual and slightly disarming: a head-over-heels-in-love album that’s also prickly and claustrophobic.
Whether with his long-running experimental pop troupe Animal Collective, his solo work, or any of his various side projects, Dave Portner, aka Avey Tare, rarely takes the same route twice.
Animal Collective’s 2009 album ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’ set a fresh benchmark for indie’s left-field, leaving entire genres in its wake. Somewhat
7s by Avey Tare: a genuinely fantastic pop record from the Animal Collective man and fearless boundary-pusher
For over 20 years, Avey Tare has been the principal songwriter and musician in Animal Collective, a unit with a pool of talent great enough to spill over into consistently worthy individual work. If the band’s latest effort, 2022's Time Skiffs, was borne of sessions and touring that started in 2019 (pre-Covid, as it were),