Album Review Animal Collective - Painting With

Dada, dinosaurs and Ukranian baked foodstuffs; the acrylic-covered palette of Animal Collective’s ‘Painting With’ is a multi-hued splurge of technicolour paints morphing and mixing together without containment. “I wanna discover the key and open the everywhere place,” sing a spliced together Panda Bear and Avey Tare amid the cut-and-stick lyrical garbles of ‘FloriDada,’. With every sound shoved forward in the mix, oodles of white space floats inbetween the sound-splats. Every moment is for the taking. ‘Painting With’ marks an immediate, and physical new direction, and anything seems possible.

It’s a pretty fitting pursuit for a band clearly obsessed with Dadaism. Though Animal Collective aren’t exactly doing a Duchamp and plonking an autographed urinal in a lofty gallery, they forever embrace mess over logic. An album about doing away with boundaries, escaping definition, and running riot across a whole everywhere world of possibilities, Animal Collective have discovered that everywhere portal key they’re searching for in ‘Painting With’.