Following their disorienting and disorganized 2016 album
Painting With,
Animal Collective took a several-years-long sidebar into the more experimental and abstract side of their output. Though always a modular entity (even on their most popular releases), projects after
Painting With felt especially so, with various combinations of members coming together for drifty soundtracks, conceptual albums, and decidedly structure-averse material released under the
Animal Collective banner.
Time Skiffs qualifies as a "proper" album, reuniting all four members on an album for the first time since 2012's
Centipede Hz and returning to as pop-friendly a sound as a band known for their unpredictability is capable of. For
Animal Collective, that means floating melody and angular hooks on top of their colorfully chaotic arrangements. Coming off a six-year stretch full of subaquatic ambience and wobbly acoustic meditations, the straightforwardness of opening track "Dragon Slayer" is almost jarring. It's a breezy shift between various two-chord vamps dotted by happy synth melodies, rising and falling dynamically in a way that recalls the band's more rock-leaning releases, like 2005's
Feels or 2007's
Strawberry Jam. Other songs follow suit to various degrees. "Strung with Everything" opens with a minute or so of reverb-slathered bell sounds and clouds of formless guitar noodling, but then quickly shifts gears by dropping a steam-powered drum beat and a slippery bass groove.
Panda Bear and
Avey Tare's dual vocal harmonies wind through sunny verses on this song, and the sing-song melodies and grinning character directly recall Terrapin Station-era
Grateful Dead, one of the band's oft-cited influences that isn't always easy to locate in their blurrier material. There's still plenty of experimentation happening here, but instead of every idea happening at once, as is sometimes the case on the band's busier albums, watery atmospheres and uncommon instrumentation are all couched in more-coherent songs. There's more of a locked-in funkiness than usual, as well, with songs like "Cherokee" and "Walker" offering up streamlined bass grooves amid their gamelan twittering and celestial breakdowns. "We Go Back" approaches an especially demented kind of jazz fusion with its tight riffing and autotuned vocal layers. It's admirable that
Time Skiffs finds
Animal Collective returning to the pop side of their vision without trying to completely replicate the pristine electronics and party-starting rhythms of their most celebrated phases. Instead of regressing or stepping away from the edge when their sound grew too unhinged, the band continues to evolve in unforecastable directions on
Time Skiffs. It's an especially lucid reading of the sound they've been perfecting for over two decades at this point, and one that adds a human warmth to a group that's long been defined by their otherworldly nature. ~ Fred Thomas