Colors Getting Warmer

Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks “Strange Colores”

I love how any time Avey Tare goes into a project thinking that he’s going to simplify things, the result is never actually simple, but just a version of what he does that’s shifted slightly in a different direction from what he’s done before. His Slasher Flicks material benefits from collaborating with new people – Jeremy Hyman is certainly a better drummer than Panda Bear, and Angel Deradoorian’s bass and harmony parts depart from the usual framing of his melodies and rhythms – but ultimately, you could play any of these songs for someone and they’d think it was a new Animal Collective album.

I think of Enter the Slasher House as a refinement of the musical ideas Avey was working through on Centipede Hz. Both are pretty direct and emphasize a “live band” dynamic, but the Slasher Flicks material successfully cuts out the overstuffed midrange frequencies that made Centipede Hz feel so cluttered and disorienting. This isn’t to say that there’s a LOT of space in these new songs, but enough to have room for melodic bass lines and silences that give definition to bursts of sound. “Strange Colores,” my favorite, isn’t “simple” by any stretch, but it does feel blunt and focused, so the bright melodies and thumping beat makes the song feel as joyful as it ought to be. I think that if this one was on Centipede, it’d be just as good as a song, but would’ve probably had a bit more sound getting in the way of those elemental things.

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