Animal Collective Time Skiffs Review: A Wistful, Quietly Reflective Album

At first blush, Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, the band’s first album in six years, seems to be a reset of the mid-2000s style that solidified their reputation. Like Feels and Strawberry Jam, the album’s nine songs run fairly long, with riffs that build toward ecstatic revelations. And as on those earlier albums, there are nonsensical, absurdist touches throughout Time Skiffs, mixing flickering field recordings with a bevy of sensorial details.

But while the Baltimore-based band once employed sudden shifts in tone, timbre, and volume, and Avey Tare unleashed unmitigated shrieks at a moment’s notice, the songs on Time Skiffs are less lively, and Tare’s yelps are toned down to a few exclamations on tracks like “Dragon Slayer.” This tempered approach is most evident on “Passer-by,” in which both the pace and vocals are painstakingly drawn out. Even the album’s peppiest cuts aren’t possessed of the busy antic-ness that defined the band’s music as recently as 2016’s Painting With.

It admittedly takes a little while to get used to Animal Collective’s less freewheeling mode on Time Skiffs. But it soon comes into focus that Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin, and Geologist are at an age where they’re taking stock of their lives and, as the album’s title suggests, that time is passing them by. “How many days do we have?” Panda Bear wonders on the lurching “Strung with Everything,” observing that “some find their way in a hearse.”

This theme is most profoundly realized on the midtempo “Prester John,” which, like the best Animal Collective songs, doesn’t fully locate its most hummable groove until halfway through. Panda Bear and Deakin handle the vocals on the track, conjuring vivid, physical imagery of leaves and sticks, before arriving at the beautiful idea of “treatin’ every day as an image of a moment that’s passed,” an evocative description of memory and the way the present can slip into the past too quickly. It feels like the clearest expression of the album’s modus operandi.

The members of Animal Collective are still doggedly in pursuit of a substantial, emotionally gratifying life and they imbue their thirst for that quest into their music. “Cherokee” takes the form of a dreamy, ever-shifting road trip that weaves references to M&Ms, Tom Hanks, pockets full of teeth, and mountain retreat gurus into its tapestry, all buoyed by iridescent synthesizers. In the song’s hazy swirl of a bridge, Avey and Panda each repeatedly sing half of the line “the stoop that you love is fiending for meaning,” their words overlapping, with Tare’s “meaning” left to resonate. You can feel the existential yearning.

“Cherokee” is also a sly reference to Animal Collective’s history with indigenous representation—or lack thereof. In recent years, the band opted to change the title of their fourth album from Here Comes the Indian to Ark because they felt that the former reflected an un-evolved perspective. On “Cherokee,” though, the title seems to refer to the Jeep or, perhaps, the Cherokee Nation’s tribal jurisdiction in Oklahoma. The nomenclature is of a piece with the band’s quixotic world-building, in which their often inscrutable lyrical impressions seem to suggest an interconnected world just outside the frame of their psychedelic creations.

Musically, Time Skiffs is thinner than the band’s densest works, where every corner is teeming with sonic stimulation. But Panda Bear’s drumming is at a career high here: His rolling snare on “Strung with Everything” is impactful, placed high in the mix, and the irregular heartbeat he taps out on “Cherokee” is disconcertingly pretty. Elsewhere, the spindly strings of “Car Keys” mimic the rattle of the titular object, while the pedal steel guitar and saloon piano on “Strung with Everything” give the song an unexpected country flavor. On the other hand, the prevalence of cutesy xylophone on “Walker” and “We Go Back” is an overly precious touch.

Overall, though, Time Skiffs is the work of a group of musicians who are leaning into the nostalgic observations that come with age. The album finds Animal Collective gracefully adapting their kaleidoscopic, existentially focused songs to the universal theme of life’s ephemerality. By definition it just means we’re hearing some vitality elude them too, as their usually energetic music gives way to wistful reflection.