The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 9/14/07 Section: The Arts

A few times a semester, the Twin Cities plays host to one of "those" concerts, the kind that draw Macalester's indie-loving masses in droves, leaving the campus half-dead. So it was with Animal Collective's Tuesday night show at First Ave. Within minutes of walking in the door, I saw several friends, dozens of classmates, and an unnamed fellow Mac Weekly member playing hookey from that night's staff meeting.

What is it, I couldn't help but wonder, that has made Animal Collective one of the defining bands of this indie generation? The obvious answer seems that in terms of their pursuit of new possibilities of sheer sound, there are few prominent indie rock bands of their generation that can match.

But we have to look at exactly what made them seem so innovative, because while their sound was fresh in the context of this decade's increasingly turgid and snoozeworthy indie rock scene, it was also a product of that same scene.

Animal Collective's rise to prominence began a couple albums into its career, with 2003's "Here Comes the Indian." Like much of the contemporary indie generation so well represented in Macalester's student body, I was thrilled by the record's mesmerizing and often frightening stew of shambolic textures and untaggable sounds.

From this album on, Animal Collective seemed to posit itself directly between the extremes of this decade's malnourished, attention-deficient hipster scene. On one hand, the '00s saw an incestous, nearly viral explosion of ear-shattering noise bands, a scene which Dusted Magazine's Scott McKeating, with due contempt, nicknamed "dudenoise."

Meanwhile, indie finally defied its homegrown obsession with authenticity, embracing the technicolor sample-and-synth splendor of pop, hip-hop, R&B, and electronic - genres that had long since soared past it on every register of innovation and freshness, if not quality.

"Here Comes the Indian" displayed a straddling of these two styles, perfect for indie rock fans not content to listen to bands rehash Pavement for the umpteenth time. They shared the noise heads' fetishism of the sonically weird and the desire for new songwriting forms while displaying a contemporary-pop-indebted affinity for wonky electronics, samples, and exotic hooks. That the album came out before either of these hipster trends had truly come to fruition seems to reveal Animal Collective as indie's subconscious brought to life.

When I saw Animal Collective as they toured to support "Here Comes the Indian," they crouched in the corner of a dingy side room of a high-rise downtown art gallery in Philadelphia, masks covering their faces, huddled over samplers, sequencers, synthesizers, and a perpetually roaring guitar.

Continued...

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