FFWD REW

Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind

Domino

Love ’em or lump ’em it’d be hard to accuse the members of Animal Collective of following anything other than their own muse. That’s never been more evident than on the first two songs of the Fall Be Kind EP both of which are heart-on-sleeve silly and unabashedly uncool.

Lead track “Graze” is the more preposterous of the two with its jaunty sample of Romanian Gheorghe Zamfir (a.k.a. Master of the Pan Flute). That said “What Would I Want? Sky” and its landmark usage of the first ever legally cleared Grateful Dead sample (a snippet of “Unbroken Chain”) is equally hippied-out.

Anyone turned off by the overt pop of this year’s previous full-length Merriweather Post Pavilion may find it difficult to listen past the EP’s opening salvo but make it to closer “I Think I Can” and you’ll be treated to seven minutes of throbbing hypnotic grooves. Nonetheless Fall Be Kind is interesting but inessential at best.

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