While Time Skiffs breathes new life into Animal Collective, it doesn’t really excite.
When Animal Collective announced their 11th album Time Skiffs, I wondered what the 2020s would hold for these indie stalwarts. Why? To be blunt, the 2010s were not great for the band. In the 2000s, when they started, they accumulated a dedicated following of hipsters, garnered critical praise, and then capped off the decade with their 2009 breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion. In the 2010s, however, 2012’s Centipede Hz received a lukewarm reception for not being another Merriweather Post Pavilion; 2016’s Painting With was a mess, and the visual component of 2018’s Tangerine Reef made it hard to digest as an audio album. Centipede Hz was also the last studio album with all four members of this famously fluid group playing together. With the exception of Geologist (Brian Weitz), each member released solo material in the 2010s, and I started to wonder if Animal Collective would slowly fade out as a band.
While Time Skiffs breathes new life into Animal Collective, it doesn’t really excite. Most of its tracks are on the quieter side, relying on carefully crafted compositions instead of experimental edges. It’s potentially their most accessible album to date, but also their most innocuous.
The greatest strength of Time Skiffs lay in its expansive, multifaceted tracks where you’re not sure where one song ends another begins. The single “Prester John” is the most obvious case here, as it was actually written by fusing two individually-written songs together. It opens with a calm, meditative section where Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Deakin (Josh Dibb) share vocals over psychedelic synths. Halfway through, the volume kicks up with an excellent bassline and a refrain of Avey Tare (David Portner) and Deakin singing “Prester John is breaking down, his heart is breaking down.” Then, just when you think the song is over, there’s over a minute of what sounds like synthesized bagpipes and gently cascading notes to make one trippy outro.
Other tracks excel at throwing curveballs as well. Panda Bear takes the helm on “Car Keys,” which strikes a good balance between oscillating synth noises and a steady drum beat. It also has one of the best choruses on the album, and like “Prester John,” features an extended outro that sounds nothing like the rest of the track. “Strung With Everything” doesn’t get going in earnest until a minute in, and is the most energetic song on Time Skiffs with a chorus that sounds like it’s made by the full quartet. Towards the end, Avey leads his bandmates in a lively call-and-response where they repeat his last word over blasts of drums and piano. I found it a little obnoxious at first, but grew to enjoy how distinctive it was over time. “Cherokee” actually has a slight folk feel to it, complete with Avey singing Bob Dylan-esque lyrics like “There will be lots of lonely mailboxes when language disappears/And people on the subway think so far and be so near.” This ramble is interrupted by a two-minute crescendo of the phrase “the stoop that you love,” before resuming as if nothing happened.
For most of the remainder of Time Skiffs, so little happens that it’s honestly a little hard to write about it. On the opening “Dragon Slayer,” a discernible synth melody quickly fades away and only Avey Tare’s vocals attempt to hold the song together. The light-hearted “Walker” bounces with xylophone notes, but sounds more like a Panda Bear solo track than anything else. “Passer-by” is so subdued that it doesn’t really leave much of a mark at all, and “We Go Back” is only memorable for having a melody that sounds vaguely like the Westminster Chimes. The closing track “Royal and Desire” stands out for being one of the rare instances you actually hear Deakin on lead vocals, and its peaceful tone blends well with his contemplative lyrics like “And what’s this lie that you place, before the birth of your world? Just trying living now.” That said, there’s so much tranquility to go around on Time Skiffs that it doesn’t feel all that unique.
Time Skiffs was recorded remotely due to COVID, which does make the album an impressive feat. However, its tracks were chosen because they could be recorded in this way, suggesting there might be a livelier recording with all four in the studio sometime soon. This makes Time Skiffs come off as a bit of a “doing what we can while we’re here” attempt, rather than Animal Collective’s best endeavor. All of its tracks are perfectly fine, and there’s nothing here that’s so abrasive that it turns you off (see: Buoys by Panda Bear). With this in mind, is something you really want when listening to Animal Collective?
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