Wednesday 12/07/06 Animal Collective, Kria Brekken @ Academy 3, Manchester

Sometimes, there is a difficulty in being a music journalist. Publications of every description demand a refrain from the personal from the I, the eye inside. And that is fair enough. But what to do when, a history of life in love with music and all its peripheries, after seeing so much and hearing even more, what to do when your belief in rock jaded? What to do when you  stumble in to two of the most extraordinary hours you will ever witness? It’s quite a claim in the whole and one that extremely difficult to locate in terms other than wholly personal ones. But let’s get this out of the way and get on with the job. This was the greatest, the most profound gig that I have ever experienced.

Kria Brekken is support the collective and immediately drags us willingly off planet Earth as we knew it into a Quay Brothers film scored by a Bjork. Bjork is a lazy comparison due to Kria’s extraordinarily brittle voice, a powerful hush sometimes English, sometimes elsewhere (a yell of “Where are you from” is immediately followed by “Over there” and we’re left none the wiser, but we’re guessing Eastern Europe) but it’s not the voice where the similarity lies. It’s the luminous spiritual atmosphere evoked through acoustic and electronic effect. A bowed mandolin, loops, keyboard and a bizarre looking triangular guitar (please shoot me down, I know I should know what the **** it is but excuse me for being completely lost). Something much older peeks through these broken shards. Stunning, strange, sublime.

And then they come. It’s true that we come with expectations. One of a handful of rock bands, absorbing and twisting beyond all recognition, painting new pictures, providing possibilities, Animal Collective make rock strange again, soak it with the strangeness of new vision and new emotion. Beyond category, blissed out in its own enormous empirical scope, the studio releases both solo and collective have often been sublime and never less than utterly fascinating. But nothing could have prepared us for this.

Tonight Mathew, Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan reappears in four form, as collective, as animal. Avery Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deaken- four individuals, playing guitars, electronics, percussion and voice. There are no formal rules here. Avery Tare primarily takes lead vocals, Panda Bear drums, Geologist utilises a host of found sounds and electronics and Deaken plays guitar. But really, they all do everything, all using electronics, all singing. And not words, although sometimes it swords. Other times its phonetics, sounds, noises. There are no breaks in between songs. One day after Syd Barrett’s death, the Academy witnesses a skyscraping blast of ultra-intense, melodically rich harmolodic Psychedelia. In the original wide-eyed, brain and body blasting sense of the word. No solos, just a rich thick texture of noise and sound and melody. It is both primeval and the future. It feels as ancient as the land the Indian lived off. An extraordinary moment occurs towards the end of the set (and it’s a long, two hours maybe but our sense of time went out the window the moment they started) as the band all grab microphones, droning, wailing shouting and singing- a truly shamanic moment and the word that best describes the whole experience. Kria runs across stage and kisses Avery Tare and then leaps down the front with the rest of us who by now have lost it, one big amorphous moving mess.

This was beyond anything we have witnessed in a venue like this with a (frankly) too bloody dull crowd. Ecstatic, redemptive, terrifying and beautiful. Beyond music, beyond words, beyond everything. A reason to live and the reason we all first ever fell in love with sound at all.