Stream: Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks ‘Enter the Slasher House’ (Show TONIGHT!)
Slaher Flicks is a new project from Animal Collective guitarist/co-frontman Avey Tare, in case you didn’t gather that from the title of the record. Ever since Animal Collective have gotten “big,” (which I would say happened post Feels), it has been interesting watching Tare and Panda Bear, the other “front man” in AC, really carve out their territory. Panda Bear has become one of the kings of dreamy, loop based electronic pop music, crafting songs that are lush and full of wonder. I have always identified Tare as the purveyor of the herky-jerky, Sung Tungs era sound of Animal Collective. His is a sound of psyched-out 60’s garage music run some sort of spastic time machine. He also, in a relative sense, is the weird one. This is and should be a selling point to longtime fans of the band. His 2007 LP with then wife Kría Brekkan was released with the songs being played backwards on tape. This was around the time that critics were tripping over each other to praise the genius of Person Pitch, so even within the realm of a band that have constantly pushed boundaries, Tare has always been the captain wandering into the technicolor abyss.
His latest LP is titled Enter the Slasher House and finds Tare joined by his current wife Angel Deradoorian (formerly of Dirty Projectors) on keys and singing and drummer Jeremy Hyman (formerly with Ponytail and Dan Deacon) on drums. It features the spirit of the earlier Animal Collective recordings, with vocals meandering but high in the mix, melodies sharp but scattered, and a general sense of acid-washed strangeness dripping throughout the whole LP. It has moments where songs venture dangerously close to pop structures (lead single “Little Fang”), but for the most part it is the kind of white-knuckled, wide-eyed adventure that you would hope and expect from Tare. For fans who are more “Who Could Win a Rabbit” and less “My Girls,” this is an album you will enjoy.
See Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks tonight at the Triple Rock Social Club with Dustin Wong, formerly of Ponytail, opening the show.
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