ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

"Animal Collective are four friends who like to get together to play music and watch movies and play football (a.k.a. soccer)."
-Paw Tracks website.

Despite the evident appeal of their deliciously skewed songs, heartbreaking hooks and deep pop sensibilities, Animal Collective is clearly not a simple or stable ‘band’ proposition. Friends and musical partners since 1992, core members Avey Tare and Panda Bear came together in 2000 with the intention of moving pop music in a direction that would place heavy emphasis on sonic experience. Soon after this, they began operating as Animal Collective, an umbrella name now used for a grouping of four people: Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deaken, who play together under different names and in different configurations (anything between 1 to 4 people), and whose releases are prone to continual musical change: from beautifully skewed pop ballads to fiercely ruptured noise-squalls to tribal rhythmic work-outs to simple folk songs, to who knows where; from fully orchestrated group freak-outs to a the intimacy of an acoustic duo.