At this point, it should be pretty clear that I’m a huge Animal Collective fan. Earlier this year I reviewed both Panda Bear and Avey Tare’s solo albums, as well as interviewing Avey Tare about his. In my interview with Avey, I asked him what was next for him. He told me that he would be getting back together with the rest of Animal Collective to start work on a new album. Obviously, this was a very exciting thing for me to learn and my excitement for what was coming from the group only began to build from there. It turns out it wouldn’t be too long before we got a glimpse of what this next record would be like, as the band announced a short six date October tour shortly after the interview.

Sadly, there weren’t any Texas tour dates so I thought I probably wasn’t going to be able to make it to this tour. However, former KANM Music Director and good friend of mine, Ian Craig recently moved to San Francisco, nearby one of the shows and I managed to get very cheap plane tickets to San Francisco. I planned a short weekend trip to visit him and we planned to see Animal Collective, as they are also one of his favorite bands.

The show was in Point Reyes, California, a tiny town outside of a gorgeous National Park about an hour North of San Francisco. The amount of people at the Animal Collective show was probably larger than the population of the town. After a great atmospheric opening set by Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa, a duo that I like quite a bit, the anticipation for Animal Collective was higher than ever.

When they band finally came out they opened with In The Flowers, the opening track off of their most popular album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. After this though they jumped straight into some new songs. They were more groovy, more minimalist but equally as psychedelic as their earlier work. They were traces of krautrock, jazz and post-rock all over these new songs, but it was still Animal Collective through and through. To be quite honest, I was amazed by these new songs. I went to the concert mostly just wanting to hear them do their old stuff but I was so thoroughly impressed by their new material that it kind of stole the show. There were three new songs that stuck out to me the most. 24, a minimalistic, krautrock inspired, Spacemen 3 feeling jam song. Cherokee, which sounded like a strange jazz number straight out of the Twin Peaks soundtrack complete with an auto tuned Avey Tare. And finally, Defeat (A Not Suite) a 20 minute long epic, spanning multiple parts. It was atmospheric, mesmerizing and almost hypnotic. It honestly is one of the best songs they’ve ever done, and I say this as someone who has spent an incredible amount of time digging through their expansive catalog.

They played a few older songs too, Grass and Banshee Beat from Feels were extremely welcome inclusions, as they are both very emotional songs for me. They also played Pulleys, a very underrated cut from Centipede Hz. Two of their songs were huge surprises though, Native Belle, the opening track from Here Comes The Indian, hadn’t been played since 2002, but they brought it back for this tour. The raw energy of that song had the crowd jumping up and down with chaotic joy. When they came back for an encore they played For Reverend Green, one of the centerpiece tracks from Strawberry Jam, my favorite album of theirs. This was a super welcome surprise for me, and made the encore extremely exciting. Avey’s vocal energy on the track still stood up, which is quite surprising as he has seemed to stray away from screamy yelpy songs on newer albums.

Overall this was one of the best concerts I have ever been to. I had never traveled by myself before and was incredibly worried to do it. But the trip was totally worth it and I am now more excited than ever for the next Animal Collective album. Best of luck to the band on their recording sessions. If they go anything like the concert did, Animal Collective will for sure have another classic on their hands.

Written by: Micah GonzalezPhoto courtesy of Simon Berndt (@1horsetown on Instagram)