If you put a group of music nerds in a locked room they will eventually start comparing non-musical aspects of their life to bands, genres and record labels they know. What is the perfect CD for a snowstorm after getting dumped by your girlfriend? Which label perfectly characterizes air travel? If a '92 Honda Accord were a song, which would it be?
More often than not the analytical stretches that are made are so uselessly precise and exclusive that they only resonate within that hypothetical room of record star clerks and split 7" record collectors. But sometimes in a burst of inspiration a connection may be bridged that deserves publication in Pitchfork Media or even a medium known to people without Stereolab T-shirts. Either way, I'd like to proclaim that Baltimore's spirit is perfectly captured by Animal Collective.
It is only fitting, and not accidental, that the genre-bending Animal Collective hails from Charm City itself. The band, though based out of Brooklyn, was formed by friends who grew up together in the Baltimore area, and though they enjoy nationwide renown within the indie culture, they frequently make appearances in the city. Last April at the Ottobar singer Avey Tare (David Porter) celebrated his birthday with relatives and fans over birthday cake and the band's distinctively unusual music. It goes without saying that one's childhood home leaves an indelible mark on the subconscious, and though I highly doubt that any of their songs are about Baltimore, they seem to resonate with the implicit spirit of the city.
The band makes good on all of the promises of experimental music. They manage to sound completely different from the vast majority of their peers, their music offers a plentitude of surprises and juxtapositions, moving beyond the typical "art for the sake of art" aesthetic found in much of the genre. Their music is lawlessly confusing, passionate, weird, hopeful, simultaneously falling apart and coming together -- difficult to like and even more difficult to understand, just like Baltimore.
This is a city in flux with so many disparate forces acting that I'm somewhat surprised the entire metropolitan area doesn't just explode into a ball of pure energy. While areas such as the Inner Harbor approach complete, gleaming revival -- others are so wrought with chaos that anyone but the most stalwart of optimists becomes a skeptic. Streets in Baltimore mysteriously flood without warning, potholes tear apart automobile suspensions and rats roam the streets with impunity. But on the other hand, a sense of underdog's pride and hopefulness buzzes undeniably with every Believe sticker or community festival.
A sense of tension exists on these trembling streets between the good and bad, the beautiful and grotesque and hope and despair. Animal Collective manages to evoke these sentiments almost simultaneously in their songs, mixing tender melodies with brutal screaming and schizophrenic effects. They offer a sound that both recalls classic pop and folk and sounds completely foreign, and sometimes even wrong.
Baltimore, though outfitted with its respectable old districts and Northeastern flourishes manages to feel completely different from Philadelphia and New York -- somehow less coherent as an entity and more tenuously connected with its own identity. Curiously, it seems to me that people who spend enough time in the city become accustomed to the weird unrest and become attuned to the off kilter rhythms and motifs.
A trail of an Animal Collective album for a new listener might elicit a sense of "Is this even music?" but eventually one can become comfortable with the band's precious, non-ironic absurdity -- a comfortable weirdness which never loses grounding in artistic sincerity and emotional affect.
It's a stretch to say that Baltimore is truly a noise pop city (it would be more conventional to say that it's a jazz city), but if I were making an art film about this magnificent drama by the Chesapeake, I would put Animal Collective on the soundtrack.
