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Animal Collective: Time Skiffs review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
(Domino)Dialling down the psychedelic mayhem, the quartet’s reflective windchimes-and-bamboo album preaches lyrically to their loyal choir
From its title, to its lyrics – which variously advise listeners to treat “every day as an image of a moment that’s passed”, “put the baggage down” and count one’s blessings compared to those who “find their way in a hearse” – to the warped version of Big Ben’s chimes that open a track called We Go Back, Animal Collective’s 11th album is a record that feels obsessed with the passing of time.
And why wouldn’t it be? The US quartet have been together nearly 20 years. It’s 13 years since their commercial and artistic peak, 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, on which a band who had always wobbled unsteadily along the line that separates the impressively exploratory from the hopelessly self-indulgent hit a graceful stride. That is an album that now feels redolent of a different age, worthy of nostalgic retrospective pieces on American music websites, hymning the “the pre-algorithm era of tastemaking guided by the prominence of MP3 blogs”: an era in which Animal Collective looked like they might cross over to mainstream acceptance. Certainly, the nature of its success suggested it was attracting attention far beyond its usual constituency: Beyoncé reworked a line from its standout single My Girls on her universally lauded album Lemonade.
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