“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 ten 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 [Gibb, AKA Deakin]. It’s just the ebb and flow of this group.”
Weitz, David ‘Avey Tare’ Portner and Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox recorded Painting With at EastWest Studios in Hollywood, occupying the same room famously used by Brian Wilson, one of the group’s key influences, on such classic records as Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile. When it came to the creative direction of the album, they looked to bring a more primitive swing to the compositions – a return in some ways to 2005’s Feels and 2007’s Strawberry Jam. Interestingly enough, this shift 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. 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.”
Although Painting With is the tenth studio album to bare the Animal Collective name, Weitz says this milestone wasn’t a factor when creating Painting With – 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.”
Throughout their 17 years as a band, Animal Collective have continually found ways to break new ground and keep their weird and wonderful dream alive. It says a lot about the creative juices that flow from each member of the group that they remain uncategorisable and proudly weird even after being a 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.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
