Animal Collective - Campfire Songs

Phoenix flame phonetics

On its initial 2003 release, Campfire Songs garnered a great deal of acclaim for its approach. Organic, fuzzy, warm, crackling: this was the sound of the fire itself, rather than those sitting around it, eating beans and singing about prairies and little dawgs.

Following on the heels of the Collective’s 2001 debut, it certainly made a huge statement about them as musicians. While Danse Manatee was a busy, bustling and occasionally brawny slab of electronica, Campfire Songs is resonant with acoustic instruments, dynamic swooshes and half-heard semi-lyrical vocal drones and harmonies. The five tracks in fact straddled the Manatee timeline, having been written when inspiration struck – and there’s plenty of that on show here. Opener Queen In My Pictures is expansive and soft-spooky, Doggy comes on raw yet tuneful, while Moo Rah Rah Rain is intense and experimental.

As an exercise in organic music-making, Campfire Songs remains fresh six years on – by no means a guaranteed outcome from a band whose output has occasionally been challenging but, more often than not, very interesting too. These undulations, interacting strands and audio snatches of rain recorded, as the album was, on a screened-in porch of a Maryland house, are the perfect place for an inner-spatial odyssey such as this.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

Paw Tracks | PAW 30

Reviewed by Joe Shooman
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