Animal Collective: Woodhouse Liberal Club, Leeds: 25.03.09
The approach to Leeds’ Woodhouse Liberal Club is a humble and human effort. With bruised brown windows, grey brick and a crowning slatted roof, the building is plotted directly from stale eighties planning – providing clinically safe, intoxicating shelter for the work and weather-worn. Travellers to the venue flock around its’ concrete benches again tonight, to anticipate entertainment, this time, in the form of Animal Collective’s Dave Portner (Avey Tare), Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Brian Weitz (Geologist). Fans will coolly drag cigarettes on the footprints of past barflies and assorted stories.
Animal Collective are an impossibly unique act that could transcend the potholes of ‘image’ and ‘defined meaning’ and fit well in a Yorkshire back alley club. And they do, their tour bus parks in front of the venue with a mini white trailer attached for equipment but you could easily picture it as staple burger van for all-night revellers. Animal Collective have a spanning discography that has remained profoundly connected to a sense of nostalgia, of humble beginnings, of naivety. The Animal sound that we now understand, as they create something as immaculately accessible as Merriweather Post Pavilion, remains as intense and simply euphoric as Feels’ Banshee Beat while compressing Tare, Bear and Geologist’s experimental, complex technical abilities. Their equipment is vast but their show is subtle; while standing in audience you’re reminded of early Flaming Lips promises that grew into mammoth creative projects with an unbounded, utopian dream. This could be the future. Their glowing white lamp tables are the impressionable, bright humanistic creatures below mechanic synths, keyboards and touchpads.
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The two hour long set that collects Portner and Lennox’s paired vocals: Panda Bear as seen in solo album Person Pitch is soothing and ethereal, just as idiosyncratic as Tare’s unusual, soaring and abrasive voice providing funk and circumstance. The breadth of the vocals at the live show epitomises the dexterity of their act – while remaining indie and pop they have fused dub beats, breaks, electro, funk and ambience into a neat, innocent package. It exists as anything you want, as overheard at the gig: “It crosses the boundaries of electro and dub, so the raver can join the guitar player. We’ve all been fooled.” With Tare’s banshee howl and writhing preaching with Strawberry Jam’s sweet melodic 'Fireworks' he inserts pedal voice samples, animal noises, forest sounds…. ‘"What's the day?" "Whats you doing?"
"How's your food?" "How's that song?" Man it passes right by me it's behind me, now it's gone I can't lift you up cause my mind is tired, it's family beaches that I desire’. Sadly there’s no circus ride of Jam’s Unsolved Mysteries tonight, no humour of lyric ‘so womanly I go to kiss her’, which showcases Tare’s blissful bleating comfort and the importance of those mostly intelligible lyrics.
The majority of Merriweather featured (Lion In A Coma/Also Frightened/Daily Routine/Guys Eyes/In The Flowers) and unusually, hints of ‘Water Curses’, ‘Grass’, ‘Slippi’ from Here Comes The Indian - assorted past material floated in and out of the set, disguised in the aesthetic of the latest album. 'My Girls', the euphoric and encapsulating single from Merriweather is the final bow, summing up the AC philosophy: ‘I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, like a social status, I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls’. Modest and technical both at the same time. In this most humble venue.
Self-revelatory bliss.
Words: Alice White
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