Avey Tare: "Oliver Twist"

“Oliver Twist” is the sound of an Animal Collective banger falling dead on its twisted ear. Like the other tracks on Dave Portner’s first solo album, Down There, the sound is a squelching mess; it plops, splashes, and spits small bubbles of melody that expand slowly and pop to make dank, reverberating things. It’s a piercingly lonely aesthetic—full of its own low-key echoes, and most pointed when grafted over the kind of push-forward beat that the rest of the Collective has excelled at of late.

But this isn’t the almighty cannonade of a “Summertime Clothes” or a “Peacebone.” Right off—Avey whispers, “Rocketttt”—a hollow, high-pitched whirr consumes the track and almost immediately subsides. The insistent beat that trots out, stuttering first with dub-like pings before launching into a strut, but a languid, gait-loosened strut, as if Avey were trying to moonwalk using only his heels, no flats, toes splayed—this beat should be a banger, it should lead into one of those massive, chirruping utopias where harsh noise and honey-rich harmonising co-exist and everybody wears t-shirts one size too big. But combined with the deadened, wispy atmospherics, and a spare, trembling vocal melody that doesn’t lead but soothes, the beat pushes forward and forward and forward through more and more swamp.

It’s a real exhausting battle: the melody gets more tired, the drum-clacks ramp up a notch; the melody pedals into overdrive, the drum-clacks stop suddenly short. For a bit. Most amazingly is an extended bit half-way through where Tare starts to pitch-shift his vocals into sounding like cracked bells, then buzzing drones, sometimes both at the same time. It’s his take on Michael Jackson zombified in “Thriller,” offering stifled catcalls to the world. Wonderful song.