Feels

(Fat Cat)

4/5 Stars

Even before Animal Collective first rolled into the collective consciousness with last year’s “Sung Tongs,” the Brooklyn menagerie fluctuated between vast, protean, electronic soundscapes that twist and turn at every melody and fuzzed-out pop songs.

“Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished,” Animal Collective’s debut album, stands as a testament to the band’s penchant for wild, digital tones, both stretched thin as paper and heaped on each other to bombard the listener with an impenetrable wall of sound.

The Collective is just as quick to embrace the pop and folk tradition. “Sung Tongs” channeled a chilled, sometimes urgent songcraft (think the Beach Boys on acid) with just Avey Tare and Panda Bear appearing, only half of the group. It was only a matter of time before Geologist and Deakin would join their zoomates and throw a monkey wrench into the band’s musical progression.

Their new album “Feels” is not a predictable progression, but for this group that itself appears almost self-evident. Since the release of “Spirit They’ve Gone,” the band has reveled in the tensions between their more experimental noise and pop-driven structures. “Sung Tongs” was only a dress rehearsal.

“Feels” is still marked by the serendipitous noises that adorn all of the Collective’s albums, but they are invariably the icing on a tortuous pop cake. “Did You See the Words” starts the album with energized guitar riffs, driving drum rhythms, and a twinkling piano that surge into place like watch gears.

Even Avey Tare’s distinctive crooning, accompanied by the obligatory yelps and squeals, has attained a veteran pop sensibility that masks the Collective’s previously amorphous noise tendencies. “Grass” and “The Purple Bottle” continue this energetic romp through pop’s playground, as if to prove that this new tendency for foot-tapping hooks and beats is here to stay.

That is, until the band tires of it and starts anew. “Bees,” the geographic middle of the record’s dreamspace and a memorable entry in the Collective canon, immediately signals a shift towards mystery.

The clear metallic strumming, a spectral Avey Tare, and a palpable, wild ambience that floats in and out of the speakers, give rise to an entrancingly undomesticated pop song.

“Banshee Beat” and “Daffy Duck,” both of which run upwards of seven minutes, cement this transition towards a newly primordial Collective sound, culminating in the haunting transience of “Loch Raven,” the showpiece of the album’s latter half.

Animal Collective brings “Feels” full circle with “Turn Into Something,” a hook-laden pop melody that could have ended the Collective’s Brooklyn brethren Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s album if they too had gotten lost in the woods. With this appropriately titled ending, you’re forced to wonder, just what is Animal Collective becoming?

“Feels” takes the listener through not only the band’s progression, but the fragmented histories of contemporary indie rock and pop, as the Collective expertly toes the thin line between experimentation and convention.