Animal Collective with special guest Tomato Flower will be performing at Wooly's on Wednesday, August 24th, 2022.

DOORS: 6:00 PM //  SHOW: 7:00 PM

Animal Collective has partnered with Plus1 to benefit Noise for Now.
Learn more at: https://noisefornow.org/

About Animal Collective

Over two decades have passed since Animal Collective accidentally began to reimagine the sound and image of what’s easiest here to call indie rock. From the start, they turned the ultimately rare trick of tucking inscrutable experiments into songs so infectious they became generational standards, empowering a new permissibility within a sometimes-stodgy scene. They helped make the world safe for The Grateful Dead and tie-dye, or indie rock open to the Gamelan and Juju. Influences, they implicitly insisted, matter less than the music and spirit they inspire. Such paradigm-bending lessons are now simply part of the paradigm, philosophical cornerstones of modern music. But Animal Collective have never sat still, even on the cornerstones they helped create. 

Time Skiffs, the quartet’s first studio album in more than half a decade, feels like listening in on a conversation among four old friends, just as it felt during their inchoate early days or their Strawberry Jam heyday. These nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder, same as they ever were. There are harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective past 20, still in search of what’s next.

It has been easy in these last two years to be more anxious than ever, to give yourself over to the sense that here we are at the end of days, every day. There are traces of that on Time Skiffs, moments of worry about the future we’re creating in the present or consternation with the moments we face now. There is sadness, turmoil, mourning. But there is mostly an undeniable joie de vivre to Time Skiffs, an excitement with love and life and nature and (sometimes) people. There are extended stargazing sessions, discursive country drives, contented creative nights, long-distance phone calls. There is gratitude and acceptance and exhilaration. “It’s really new every day,” goes one line that sticks out not as some overwrought thesis but as a genuine realization, an epiphany in real time. That is the prevailing sense of Time Skiffs—that, at our absolute best, we can be ever new, always in awe of what is yet to come.

Despite the protracted gestation, Time Skiffs is shorter than most Animal Collective records. But as it ends, you long to linger for a while longer, to coexist with the band in this full state of being and feeling. That is perhaps the real feat of Time Skiffs, made by a band whose songs seemed so audacious and new that their emotional cores could sometimes be overlooked. Here is the heart of Animal Collective. 

Avey Tare has said that, for him, hearing music has always been a way to be transported, to be whisked away to another time for three or seven or ten minutes at a time. These nine songs, then, are now your own Time Skiffs, your vehicles for traveling to the wilds of Western North Carolina or a sunset surrounded by seagulls or a New Orleans night making music with your friends or any other moment, however real or imagined, that floats into your mind. For these 47 minutes, you feel like you belong somewhere else, like you’ve returned to a place that feels both familiar and foreign, where reality is bent just enough to suggest some beautiful new horizon. Enjoy the trip to whenever and wherever these time skiffs may take you.

About Tomato Flower

Following the release of Tomato Flower’s stand-out future-pop debut, Gold Arc, the Baltimore unit turns their utopian impulse towards the worldly with Construction, a fresh set of densely knotted pop songs. Austyn Wohlers (guitar/keys/vox), Jamison Murphy (guitar/vox), Mike Alfieri (drums), later adding Ruby Mars (bass), meld irresistible melodies with rhythmic trickery, bending genre and palette at will. 

Construction refers both to “constructedness,” processes of artifice and social construction, as well as the material activity of building. The music evokes something sculptural,  reflecting  the painstaking processes of material transformation that create physical objects. “Blue” comments acerbically on the profit motive; “Fancy” takes on the ambivalence of desiring success; “Aparecida” imagines a religious vision cut short by having to clock in to work. But for all their literary sensibility and taste for double meanings, Tomato Flower rejects ironic detachment. Feeling is always at the center of the songs, even when the feeling morphs and evades; “Bug” is simultaneously vulnerable and threatening, and “Taking My Time” moves from a plaintive love song to a joyous prophecy. Construction shows a band with a distinctive approach and a deep archive from which they reveal only the brightest and most confounding of pieces.

The band recorded Construction over fall of 2019 into winter of 2021 in the same time frame as their debut, Gold Arc. Much of the music came together in the peak days of COVID isolation during long days on the top floor of Austyn and Jamison’s rowhouse, overlooking aging Baltimore architecture. As a group of self-professed psychedelic nerds, the band used this time of uncertainty to stretch the limits of both study and play. The process of composing Construction combined a spirit of academic rigor and intense experimentation as they holed up and crafted pristine jewels of rock music. 

For Tomato Flower, stylistic synthesis through the process of songwriting is foundational to the project of genuinely modern pop music. The band’s nuance is achieved by expanding the rhythmic and harmonic palette of a rock band while maintaining the strictness of pop songwriting and its insistence on melody. Perhaps the farthest out from the band’s usual template is “Fancy,” an extended, meditative song with shades of slowcore and shoegaze while “Bug” is perhaps the archetypal Tomato Flower song; its dense, often dissonant guitar interplay, sharp emotional shifts, and jazzy chord qualities are guided by Wohlers’s intimate lead vocal. “Blue” moves from jerky guitar riffs to an ambient outro, reflecting the band members’ shared interest in more textual, expansive types of music. “Taking My Time” sits tautly between post-punk and Bacharach-style pop music before soaring into an angelic bed of harmony; the heavenly firmament as seen through the beams of the construction site.

Construction marks the end of the first phase of Tomato Flower and the beginning of a new phase. Regrouped in Baltimore as a four-piece, they are currently working on their first full-length and playing shows up and down the East Coast and beyond.

Show pictured above: 3OH!3 & Emo Nite at Wooly's on December 5th, 2018. (Photo taken by Ryan Watanabe)