Last weekend, I had the wonderful fortune of attending a stop on the tour of Animal Collective showcasing their most recent album, "Painting With."
In no uncertain terms, Animal Collective is my favorite band of all time. I love everything about them: their art; their style; their lyrics; and especially their music. When I heard that Animal Collective would be touring again, a dream that had been boiling in my heart for years was finally in the position of coming true. Even though I consider myself a serious music nerd, I haven’t had many concert experiences; a few South Dakota-sized venues and a couple jazz festivals, but never anything as big as this concert. Up until this point, I’d really missed out on the concert experience, getting most of my fill from live recordings on YouTube. So imagine my joy when I found out my favorite band of all time would be playing within driving distance, and they will just so happened to be my first big concert experience.
And with this concert, something happened within me that I forgot could still happen. The night before the show, before the five-hour drive and three-hour wait, as I laid in bed, I found myself completely overtaken with the same sense of childish wonder associated with Santa Claus. Now, I haven’t believed in Santa Claus for years, so it’s definitely safe to say I had forgotten this feeling. What made this feeling different was the fact that I had been following this band since the day I found them, and their music and philosophy had such an immense impact upon my life that I simply could not sleep. Nonetheless, I tried to keep my expectations low, as I didn’t want to ruin things for myself; something I would soon see was pointless.
First Avenue in Minneapolis served as the perfect venue for my first big name concert. Granted, Animal Collective isn’t the biggest name per say, but the concert space and atmosphere emulated the vibe that this concert was something serious. And boy was that true. The open admission tickets meant that I was crammed, shoulder to shoulder, with people just as excited as I was. First Ave.’s black box style stage made for a great intimate performance space, giving me a view of the guys as they worked away on their keyboards and samplers, feeling each movement down to the turn of a knob. Visuals-wise, each member had their own platform decorated with endless cords and controllers, with a large panel in front. These panels were one of the best parts of the show due to the fact that three separate projectors screened images and video with the change of each song. At multiple times during the show, I would turn my head to see entire groups of concert goers reaching their hands into the path of the light, staring intensely at the animations as if they were tattooed onto their hands.
Few things have I experienced in life so powerful as the start of this concert, comparable only to a jet taking off paired with the disorienting power of getting sucked into a whirlpool with floaties on every limb. It almost felt as if the speakers braying this unadulterated bliss were specifically placed so as to align the sound in the most thoroughly mind numbing fashion possible. The melodic assault of sound that dominated my ears left me feeling disoriented, to the point of almost feeling lost, like there was something I needed for the longest time but still couldn’t reach. A veritable wave of anxiety began to ripple through the crowd, with many a confused and helpless look exchanged with the strangers around me.
From what I’ve learned after this whole experience, this abrasive torrent of sound and light was completely intentional. On closer look of the set list for that night, the first four songs were presented and played in a hectic style for the purpose of causing the aforementioned disorientation. The first four songs all had me dancing, but at the same time, feeling uneasy so as to prepare me for the control they would soon employ. For it was after these torrid songs that Animal Collective took control, not just of me, but of the entire crowd, the building, and even the air. During the second half of the song "Daily Routine," when the driving force of the music gives way to a reverb-laden expanse of vocals and arpeggios, the center member of the group had complete control of the bass perforating my mind and soul. Amidst the power of the song, I caught a fleeting glimpse of his small tweaks and turns of each little dial before his fingers. And in that moment, I could feel every little twist, each little equalization, as wave after wave of resounding bass pumped through every atom of that building and everything in it.
It was at this moment that I knew I was going to be OK. It was after that crowd-wise reset that all the expectations and anxiety that I had been hoarding immediately vibrated out of my consciousness and was then replaced with pure emotion, although this emotion was like nothing I had ever felt. Nothing before had ever elicited such raw emotion out of what I now understand to be my far too adultly frame. I was utterly roped in as my knees began to bend a little more here and there, sucking me into this atmosphere of unadulterated connection to the people and place around me. Yet in this connection, I felt a comforting sense of isolation from those around me; my real reckoning coming from the powers on stage. The intensely intimate nature of Animal Collective’s music had me watching these men closely as they played, as if they were men in a boiler room controlling my own heart. The pure awe of seeing them perform invigorated all I loved about this band and more, altering even to this day my understanding of their music and genius.
By the end of the show, the entirety of the crowd was moving as one, singing along with each verse as one beloved song after another rolled by. My understanding of time in any relative sense had at this point completely evacuated from my thought, I was perfectly content within this controlled chaos. But just as soon as it had begun, the show was over, leaving me and everyone around me rocked to the very center. As I slowly walked out of the show, back toward my life and everything in it, I began to realize what had just happened. I was filled with a sense of almost instant nostalgia as the scenes of the past few hours still followed their revolutions around my solar head. A great longing developed too, immediately filling me with the desire to go back, to walk back to the front of the stage where, once, I had lived. But I knew that I could never go back, that’s not why I was there.
It has been a week since my journey and I’d definitely say I’m still recovering. Still, at many points during the day, images, thoughts, videos and sound bites all float into my frame of comprehension. It must have simply been too much for my brain, as I often find myself drifting into that night, seeing details I never did at the time, hearing parts of songs below other songs, haunting me in the best way possible. I’d say I’m still trying to figure it all out along with my brain. Nothing would have made it any better or worse—it all came together perfectly to allow me the experience I will never have again. Perhaps that’s what I’m supposed to take away from this: It will never happen again, and that’s OK. To foster any thoughts that I should need to repeat that night would be detrimental to the experience; of course I need to see more shows, but I must understand that I’ll probably never experience this band in this exact way again. Instead, accepting that it happened and relishing in it will serve me greater in the long run of my music journey.
If anything, this concert showed me that I am still a kid—an inexperienced, over-assumptive kid. I shouldn’t be so set in my ways as to think that being a kid is unimaginable anymore, seeing as I lived as one for a couple hours a week ago. What is really going to stick with me is the thought that Santa Claus is still real, just not in the same jolly form of years past. He’s replaced now by what excites me about living in the modern age, like being able to drive five hours to see something I’m passionate about. My childish anticipation was never really gone; it was simply waiting for Christmas to come. But since Christmas no longer means what it did in the past, Old Saint Nick has been replaced by the likes of bands like Animal Collective, offering a night of uncensored childish bliss in the form of samplers and drums.
