Animal Collective Kick Out The Jams

03/03/09 2:51pm

by Noah Love (CHARTattack)

After putting out two of the best releases of this decade, Animal Collective took a well-deserved year off from being prolific and simply toured the material for their long-planned next release.

Strawberry Jam is an evolutionary leap forward for the psych rockers. We caught up with Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) at his home in Portugal to talk about the album and the group's critical success.

Chart: For the first time in a while, Animal Collective took a year off from putting a record out. Were you guys happy to have a little more time to work things out?
Noah Lennox: It's always nice to sort of spend a lot of time on something to sort of get it to where you want it. I feel like we're all kind of perfectionists in a way, and we take a long time to do things because we want to do them a particular way. I feel like we're all particular people, each in our own way. I feel like it's tough for us to get done really quickly or to move really quickly. Like, the writing process can go pretty fast for us 'cause we've known each other for a long time and we've played with each other for such a long time that we can work pretty quickly on that side of things.

You guys always play ahead in your live sets. You ended up performing the Strawberry Jam material for two years because you took the year off from recording. How do you feel about the songs now?
I think we're all pretty far past them. This one in particular, I almost feel like we overworked it 'cause I don't think any of us have listened to it so much. And that's not to say any of us think it's bad, but I think we've lost a bit of perspective on it just playing the songs for two years and then recording it. And we spent two mixing sessions, like we weren't totally happy the first time we did it, so we went back and did it again. I think we kind of killed it for ourselves a little bit. But I'm happy with it, for sure. It's just that I can't imagine myself having an urge to listen to it anytime soon.

The last two records have received a fairly overwhelming critical reception. Do you pay much attention to it? Does it create any pressure?
I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do something that we're excited about, which makes it a little scary for me on this one, you know how I was talking about how we totally lost perspective on it, so I feel like we don't even know if it's good or not. We know we worked the shit out of it, but I kind of feel lost a bit. But we definitely put a lot of pressure on ourselves to work as hard as we can, to come up with the best music we can. I feel like after that you don't really have too much control over anything. Also, with how many records we've put out at this point, I used to be way more stressed out about that sort of thing. But maybe just the volume of stuff we've done at this point, the pressure from the outside has seemed like less to me.

The following feature is from Chart Magazine's September 2007 issue. You can purchase the issue at the Chart Shop.