Whatever else you make of Animal Collective live, it is hard not to be impressed by their stage set. It's not every Sunday night you come across a band performing amid a collection of giant inflatable tentacles and teeth, the former in psychedelic shades and the latter, erupting into different colours and flashing in time to the music. Of course, like the abstract films that flicker on the screen, the stage set serves to distract the eye from Animal Collective themselves – the recipients of much acclaim, but seldom involving the phrase "born showmen" – but it also tells you something about the position they currently enjoy, in the wake of the success of 2009's album Merriweather Post Pavilion: presumably custom-made inflatable tentacles and teeth don't come that cheap.
The recent follow-up to Merriweather, Centipede Hz, however, is dense, knotty and less immediate. There's something laudable about a band who treat their commercial breakthrough not as something to be repeated but another aspect of their sound, but the problem tonight is that the nuances of the music get lost on stage. On record, Animal Collective are at their best when the clutter of their sound coalesces into something joyous and transcendent, like a Heath Robinson contraption that improbably achieves lift-off. Tonight, that's something that happens less frequently than you might hope: with the band members visibly wrapped up in their work, you're left struggling with the murky sonic patchwork of samples, stuttering rhythms and yelped, distorted vocals.
That said, when it works, it is pretty spectacular. Moonjock's tune emerges intact from the chaos, the harmony vocals soaring ecstatically over the crashing beats; Today's Supernatural's propulsive hook is wildly exciting, its sense of wide-eyed wonder – "Have you seen the clouds? You should come on out!" – authentically infectious. At moments like that, Animal Collective feel as strange and transporting as the scenery around them.
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