Sir Richard Bishop, a member of Sun City Girls, opened the show at the Picador in Iowa City on that Friday night. At times he reminded me of Kinky Friedman, with his snarling profanities and between song stabs at the Freak Folkers. He played a Django tune, some classical stuff, and generally made me wonder what was under his hat, because that’s all I could see over the packed-in crowd. His set was nice, concise, and everything one would expect from a very talented dude with a good-sounding acoustic guitar.

Animal Collective was different, very different. Even different from themselves. They played sans one member, with a few Roland 303 boxes, some minimal drums, a few mixers and a couple mini discs and pedals. No guitars at all, no keys, (maybe a small one up there somewhere), no frills. I got the skinny from their tour manager Brad, whom I had come to see as well as the AC. He told me they had a member on hiatus for a bit, just doing life things, so they threw together this set of stuff two weeks before the tour and off they went. They have a new LP in the can, but they wrote all this stuff just for this tour! A couple old tunes were peppered in there, but really the set was like a an Animal Collective rave movie soundtrack. I wished I was tripping, honestly, as the beats segued into each other, the delayed screams syncopated through the air. There was no specific sound to pin down, no thing to grab onto and call a song. Avey and Panda (his back to the band) played off each other, Avey clutching the mic and bending into his voice. Geologist’s head lamp bobbed off to the side, arcing a beam of light through the smoke and sweat. The crowd pressed in close, and anyone who passed by us (standing by the merch table) was talking about the heat and the beat. My other pal Brad K. (of considerable fame) leaned over at one point and asked how in the hell they were doing what they were doing, knowing what was going to happen like that with all the electronic stuff. I looked to the stage and thought a minute, and replied that I thought they are just really good. Like the Stones or Pink Floyd, they are just a good band, but doing this interaction in a new way. Brad seemed satisfied with that. It’s the only explanantion; that connection a band makes after a time. They don’t need to see each other, they just know.

After the show, a scenester girl who had come down from Minneapolis to see them, talked at length about how unfair it was that they had to move their own equipment. They were “bigger” than that. Hmmm…I think they like it that way. Turns out that although they have a small load of devices that make the actual sounds (it could fit in the trunk of a Camry), they choose to use six huge, powered QSC monitors for their stage setup. Two for each guy. They lug those 100LB monsters out themselves every night, arraying them in a fence/wall of sound around them, kind of creating their own space to do that magic in. Seems like that brand of magic works, and it works in spades.

Animal Collective Official Site