You never know who’s going to show up on an Animal Collective record. Not because the band has a revolving door lineup – in fact, the same four members have made up the group since its inception in 1999.
Rather, Animal Collective treat themselves as just that: a collective, with releases under their name coming from any combination of the four. In the case of Painting With, the first Animal Collective record in four years, the band has convened as a trio, returning to the lineup behind 2009’s landmark release, Merriweather Post Pavilion. However, change and evolution are still the name of the game.
“It always starts with a text conversation or an email chain,” explains Brian Weitz, AKA Geologist, who has performed on eight of the group’s albums. “We talk pretty much every day – I mean, I’m not always talking to all three, but I speak with at least one of the others every day. We’re always sending each other stuff – inside jokes, weird shit on YouTube. It might be a few years between records sometimes, but we never fall out of contact with one another. Usually, sometime after we’ve taken a little break, one of us will float the idea of the next record to see if anyone else is thinking about it. It’s never taken personally if one of us doesn’t want to or doesn’t have the time to do it – in this case, it was Josh [Dibb, AKA Deakin]. It’s just the ebb and flow of this group.”
Painting With was recorded by Weitz, David ‘Avey Tare’ Portner and Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox at EastWest Studios in Hollywood, in the same room famously used by Brian Wilson – one of the group’s key influences – while making such classic records as Pet Sounds and Smile. When it came to the creative direction of the album, Weitz looked to up the energy levels and bring a more primitive swing to the compositions – a return, in some ways, to previous LPs such as 2005’s Feels and 2007’s Strawberry Jam. This shift, interestingly enough, came from an unexpected outside influence.
“I was listening a lot to the first Ramones record,” says Weitz. “I really enjoyed that listening experience – I mean, I always have, but there was something about the record this time around that clicked with me. It made me think about Animal Collective somehow – the thought that we’d never made a record like that before. The kind of record where all the songs are really short, there’s no ambience, no songs that are slow, no songs that are sad. The kind of record where it opens up with this huge punch and it just doesn’t let up the entire time that you’re listening to it. I really wanted to make a record like that. I thought it would be a lot of fun. I threw the idea out there, and it turns out Dave had been thinking the same sort of thing – just with early Beatles records.”
Painting With marks the tenth studio album to bear the Animal Collective name. Weitz is quick to point out, however, that this milestone in the Animal Collective canon was not a factor when creating the record – as a matter of fact, the group had almost lost count along the way. “To me, it doesn’t even feel like the tenth album – it feels more like 11th or 12th,” says Weitz. “We put out this DVD a while ago called ODDSAC, and it took up a tonne of time. It felt like making a record over the period of a few years. We have this live album, too, called Hollinndagain, which I treat as our third record. I know people don’t really count live albums as proper records, but I still see it as a documentation of what we were making at the time. We definitely weren’t aware that we were making our tenth studio album when we did Painting With. We know we’ve made a lot of records, though, and we’re proud of that.”
Now entering their 17th year as a band, Animal Collective have found new ways to break ground and keep their weird and wonderful dream alive. It says a lot about the creative juices that flow within each member of the group that a band ostensibly defined by being uncategorisable and proudly weird can still find new ways to do so, even after being part of the indie rock furniture for such a long time.
“I think, for any creative person, running out of ideas is a fear that always lingers in the back of your mind,” says Weitz. “Thankfully, it hasn’t happened to us yet. I put that down to our own sensibilities and our own tastes. We all have really different tastes in music and we’re all really open-minded about what the other will bring to the music that we create together. There’s an Animal Collective sound at this point, and we don’t really know how to describe it. We’d have never wanted that when we were starting out – to us, having an identifiable sound was like the kiss of death. We don’t mind it so much now – mainly because we still know what excites us about music. I like sounding like Animal Collective.”
