“Let’s do it again/And again, and again, and again,” Noah Lennox implores on “Gem & I,” a dub-inspired track on Animal Collective’s Isn’t It Now? It’s an odd statement, as the Baltimore-based band that Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) helped form some two decades ago has rarely repeated themselves. But while he and his bandmates are often “changing the name,” to quote the song’s chorus, of whatever era they’re in, Lennox accepts, mere moments later, that he’s “staying the same” no matter how hard he tries to resist.
Much like last year’s similarly contemplative Time Skiffs, Isn’t It Now? finds the group’s members ruminating on their triumphs, failures, and regrets—all before coming to a universal, if a tad rote, understanding that things are constantly changing. Both albums also openly embrace organic instrumental palettes, as opposed to the musique concrete style of the group’s 2010s output. Since then, Animal Collective has mellowed out a bit; the shrieks and cries that can be heard on Feels and Strawberry Jam, for example, are nowhere to be found here.
Their newly chill methodology is reflected most clearly on the album’s front-loaded first leg. Tracks like the Zappa-esque “Magicians from Baltimore” feature quirky sonic choices—in this case, the throbbing rings of a zeusaphone—that suggest psychedelic freak-outs are about to commence but instead build into more tightly composed arrangements. Likewise, the freewheeling “Soul Capurer” finds Lennox and David Portner (a.k.a. Avey Tare) trading duties as usual, but rather than the grating syllable trade-offs of 2016’s Painting With, Lennox does the operatic yelping while Avey plays the straight man of sorts.
The group’s newly succinct songwriting instincts are abandoned on the album’s centerpiece, “Defeat.” At nearly 22 minutes, it’s the longest Animal Collective song to date, and the languidly paced track—which opens with a series of hypnotic, drone-heavy tone clusters that go nowhere, only for a percussion section to casually enter into the mix after eight laborious minutes—takes its sweet time to get to anything resembling a thesis statement. Recalling the band’s more jam-oriented, texture-building early material, the song caps off with a pleasant-enough maxim about how the crushing weight of loss will eventually subside, but hardly any section of “Defeat” wouldn’t benefit from being trimmed down by a couple minutes.
The remainder of Isn’t It Now? is composed of four songs whose collective runtimes barely scratch that of “Defeat.” Sequenced back to back, they can’t help but come off as a bit of an afterthought. While these tracks are oftentimes quite pleasant to the ear, and continue to harken back to Animal Collective’s past, they’re rarely memorable, let alone groundbreaking.
By contrast, the breathtakingly gorgeous “Stride Rite” is about as pensive as Animal Collective has ever been. Composed of a myriad of cascading piano chords, the song amounts to an eerie, ethereal experience about the many heartbreaks that come with maturation, one expressed with a level of clarity that’s sorely lacking from the rest of Isn’t It Now?
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