Animal Collective

Animal Collective

Animal Collective started its set on Sunday night at Webster Hall with rough scraping sounds, a loop of a shout and a swelling chordal drone. It was the latest variant of the drone that runs through great primitivist New York art-rock. And Animal Collective harnessed it in ways all its own: not the ominous fixations of the Velvet Underground, not the oceanic expanses of Sonic Youth, not the jittery stasis of TV on the Radio, but something at once joyful, obsessive and oddly pastoral. Animal Collective, from Brooklyn, makes albums that betray long, strange, manic hours in the studio, layering and tweaking sounds. On its most recent albums, ...