Feels Turns 20

"There's something starting, don't know why," Avey Tare sings early on. What was starting? Animal Collective, the rock band, sort of. As for why? The moment practically demanded it of them.

AnCo have never fit neatly into categories. Indie, psych-pop, experimental music — even, dare I say, blog-rock — whatever bucket you want to put them in, it's never quite congruent. They are more like a category unto themselves, with plenty of disciples following in their wake. But on Feels, released 20 years ago this Saturday, the oft-morphing band took steps toward something like straightforward form and function, as if following their own advice: "You should turn into something."

Feels came out at a time when indie rock was beginning to boom and Animal Collective were accumulating hype. Music blogs and Pitchfork had assembled into a pipeline toward 15 minutes of sub-mainstream fame. With 2004's Sung Tongs, Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox)'s much-hyped contribution to the Year Freak-Folk Broke, AnCo had gotten on that ride. Now, with Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) back in the fold, the Baltimore natives had decamped to Seattle to make what was, at the time, one of only a small handful of AnCo records with the full lineup present.

Listening back to Animal Collective's pair of 2003 albums, the minimalist psych-folk exercise Campfire Songs and the zonked noise-rock experiment now known as Ark, the thought of this group making a pop record was probably laughable. On the other hand, it sometimes feels just as ridiculous to refer to what came next as pop music. But with Sung Tongs, Animal Collective's abstract, hallucinatory music started to feel a little more structured and accessible. Songs like "We Tigers" were still freaky enough to scare off most people, and even the pretty ones like "Mouth Wooed Her" were unabashedly weird. But an undeniable Beach Boys influence was beginning to show, and "Who Could Win A Rabbit" was catchy enough to get stuck in the head of the least adventurous listener you know.

Arriving a year and a half later, Feels harnessed that song's manic giddiness on a handful of pounding, ebullient rock songs. Yet for all their peculiarities, the songs on Feels come much closer to mainline 2000s indie rock than Animal Collective had allowed themselves to wander before, and not just because so many bands would soon be ripping these guys off. When "Did You See The Words" kicks off the album — chords wafting upward like the blurry steam over a boiling cauldron, pianos delicately plinking, restrained drums paving the way for the upcoming catharsis — how different is it, really, from the far more buttoned-up Arcade Fire's solemn introduction to Funeral?

The most prominent difference, of course, is that Animal Collective were unhinged to a whole different degree. Within the arc of indie, their posture represented a significant change from the emotional obfuscation of bands like Pavement, who the AnCo bros covered together in high school, but with all of the loopiness. Maybe it was a reaction to 9/11 and the War On Terror, as Animal Collective collaborator Vashti Bunyan posited in a 2004 New York Times report on freak-folk: “It's a particularly difficult time to look at the world, and maybe right now it just easier to create your own." For whatever reason, in keeping with the the preciousness, the escapism, the communion with nature that typified the Marc Greif's "green" hipster, the group talked a lot about reconnecting with their inner children in those days.

"Magic and childhood and music-making are three things that just have a way of coming together, at least for us," Avey told the Baltimore City Paper. "The idea of magic to me is similar to how a child relates to the world, and what a child is capable of, using its imagination. I think anyone is capable of it, all through their life, mostly they just forget how to do it." In the same story, Panda Bear added, "Live, we get kinda crazy, like kids who have had too much sugar. Kids who don't care what other people think of them, who aren't thinking about how they look. They just want to go crazy."

Feels captures that experience many times throughout. "Did You See The Words" begins things on a jubilant note, with mirage-like indie rock, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"-worthy falsetto, and occasional explosions of beauty. "It's messy/ Yes, this mess is mine," Avey proudly declares, yet despite the cartoonish vocals and the feeling that woodland creatures are dancing around you, it's some of the least abstract music under the Animal Collective banner up to that point. Even more energized is "Grass," on which the psychotropic gremlin melodies give way to joyous shrieks, like Pet Sounds gone feral.

This is music you can't really enjoy in polite company. In 2005, not many bands had more hipster cachet than Animal Collective, but engaging with Feels on its own terms required you to let your guard down, to let yourself be ridiculous. In the same way that giving yourself over to modern buzz bands Geese and Wednesday requires you to get on the singer's wavelength and forgo any expectations of easy listening, there was a confrontational quality to this music — they weren't antagonistic, but they also weren't the least bit inclined to rein themselves in. As the 2000s rolled on, indie's ceaseless procession into pre-adolescence would eventually yield more passive nostalgia in the form of chillwave, and pop culture in general would bend toward twee affectation. Eventually, they'd sand off the rough edges with the sparkling gem "My Girls," but circa Feels AnCo's piercing, wide-eyed flights of fancy were far too freaky to be repurposed as background music at H&M.

Despite those moments of ecstatic release, more than half of Feels is devoted to shapeless, hallucinatory swoons — psychedelic soups to splash around in at your leisure. AnCo sound out of their minds on those tracks, perhaps even more than on the upbeat selections. You can practically see the dazed expressions on their faces within the shimmer of "Daffy Duck" and "Flesh Canoe" or the stretching, sighing, surreal Eastern experiment "Bees." It's all undeniably trippy, even when the lyrics are rooted in everyday experience, as on the romantic "Loch Raven," one of the Feels tracks on which AnCo applied their childlike reverie to more grownup concerns. There's also a distinct connection to nature throughout, one that literally manifests in some tracks; Geologist told Arthur that "Banshee Beat" features "like three different recordings of Josh, Dave, and I making our way through the woods at night, having to break through branches, pushing thorns away."

Feels is at its best, though, when Animal Collective go nuts — perhaps never better than on the nearly seven-minute centerpiece "The Purple Bottle." The track builds patiently and purposefully without sacrificing its livewire energy, matching tribal and martial drums with harmonic instrumentation that wouldn't be out of place on a Walkmen album. It's another love song, communicating attraction the way only Animal Collective can, nodding toward primitivism with unbound passion but also conservatory-worthy sophistication. "I've got a big, big, big heartbeat, yeah!" Avey announces. "I think you are the sweetest thing." Then he sums up this album's whole deal in a few words: "I wear a coat of feelings, and they are loud."