“Painting has more freedom to be abstract than music,” says Brian Weitz, a member of indie-pop group Animal Collective, in advance of the band’s 10th album, “Painting With.” “You can be popular and very experimental in painting.”The line between pop and experimentation
is one that the band has straddled over the past 15 years with relative success. Throughout, the idea of painting kept returning. Their latest album, to be released on February 19, is the first to name this inspiration explicitly. (Around 2006, member David Portner suggested, unsuccessfully, that they change the name of the band to the Painters.) Recorded in Los Angeles, the songs they were writing had a “splashy” quality that reminded them of a “messy painting.” In the studio, they started to look
more closely at the
work of their friend, the Gang Gang Dance member and painter Brian Degraw, who ended up contributing the
three different versions
of “Painting With”’s cover, fractured portraits of each of the group’s members.The distorted perspectives of Cubism and Dada are what ultimately influenced the content
of the record most profoundly, the group says. The latter gets
a direct nod in the title of “FloriDada,” the album’s first single, but it also informs the band’s creative process in general — the simple idea, as Portner explains, “of taking something common-place, like a pop song,
and then messing around with it.”
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