Animal Collective

Animal Collective

Sung Tongs (FatCat) While it's certainly plausible to view Brooklyn's Animal Collective as a psychedelic folk hybrid, the duo's overbearing reductive tendencies make this something of a misnomer in the populist sense. When Avey Tare and Panda Bear stumble upon something resembling a conventional song structure, they zealously drown it in a swirling mass of repetition, monosyllabic vocal chants, and looped noise. You can imagine a modern-day Syd Barrett coming up with similar ideas after being locked in a closet with a laptop. "Leaf House" evokes both tension and whimsy with its cyclical interplay among percussion, guitar, and vocals. By contrast, "The Softest Voice" is an aural collage eschewing form for texture. The lilting six-minute trance roughly approximates the noise that might waft through the ether early Sunday morning at an artist's retreat. A short-but-sweet high point is "College," a twisted nod to Beach Boy harmonies colliding with the sound of frying eggs. Or is that your brain? Clocking in at 12 minutes, "Visiting Friends" is the midway demarcation where Sung Tongs either solidifies its spell or really starts to piss you off. This exhaustive, seemingly random soundscape might enhance your next black-light drug ritual, but it could just as easily induce an embarrassing visit to the freak-out tent. Is this artful challenge or solipsistic thwackery? Think about that too much and you might go slightly mad. (Animal Collective plays Emo's Tuesday, Aug. 31.)