People are Animals Too

Last night, Seattlest was at a packed Neumo's to see Animal Collective. Having missed them on other tours (or, rather, not getting into their music until recently), we weren't quite sure what to expect. A colleague who had previously seen them play warned us that one of his worst concert-going ordeals involved AC as an opening band: "It might be terrible." Well, we wouldn't go so far as to say the show was terrible, but it wasn't exactly the most pleasant thing we've experienced either.

Though the band didn't wear the animal garb they sometimes don, we did spot giraffe masks and zebra backpacks in the audience. The show was all-ages, so the crowd was skewed toward hipster youths. Unfortunately, these young turks were also prone to mosh-like behavior. Now look, we don't mind when a crowd is dancey---in fact, we love those rare occasions when a Seattle audience gives up its indier-than-thou attitude and just gets down---but we like people to dance in their own space. Pushing and shoving? Not so much. We thought about informing the offending parties that it was no longer 1995 (*shaking fist*), but when we realized that the ne'er-do-wells were probably five years old at the time, we kept our fuddy-duddy thoughts to ourselves.

As to Animal Collective, they only played, like, five songs we recognized from their last two albums, filling the rest of their hour-plus set with a lotta drone. Come on, guys. Those five songs were great (especially "Grass" and "Purple Bottle" off their latest release Feels), but we needed more bursts of pop brilliance like that and less of the rest. Two notes being played over and over again gets to be a bit tiring, mmmmkay. The first twenty minutes of the show in particular was borderline bad. It was only when they launched into "We Tigers" from Sung Tongs that the crowd really started to get into it, but after that it was back to the mellow distortions and reverb, punctuated every once in a while by an actual, full-fledged song.

Hey, we can't complain too much; we're glad to have seen them play purely from a clinical standpoint. The fact that they are able to approximate their layered, sample-heavy, weird-pretty album sound live is impressive. But after last night, we've decided that we'd much rather experience Animal Collective in the pre-recorded form.