[The cover art to Animal Collective’s 2022 album Time Skiffs, whose mixture of the abstract and primitive will prove salient, as I soon hope to demonstrate.]  

Time Skiffs is Animals Collective’s best new album since their 2009 masterpiece Merriweather Post Pavilion. That is a frankly low bar to clear. They have only released two other LPs as a full band since then: 2012’s hotly-anticipated Centipede Hz, which was just straight-up bad^[1]Seriously, anytime you hear me ragging on music streaming services, you can shut me right up by reminding me that I once paid real, hard-earned money to own Centipede Hz on CD, and 2016’s Painting With, which was only an improvement by default^[2]And the fact that penultimate track “Golden Gal” opens with a sample from Golden Girls has only made the song unintentionally sadder since Betty White’s recent passing. Both just had the inescapable feeling that they were trying too hard, to accomplish something that had come very naturally to them the decade previous.

Even when accounting for EPs and solo projects, none of their 2010’s releases ever came close to recapturing the magic of their prolific 2000s output. Now, bands running out of gas creatively is of course nothing new, but I suspect there is something deeper going on here than mere artistic burnout. I think there are real differences between the two decades that need to be addressed.

To put it briefly, before diving in deeper: it is no accident that Animal Collective’s dazzling 2000s oeuvre emerged during the War on Terror years; that Merriweather Post Pavilion was released during the triumphant transition-period from Bush to Obama; that Centipede Hz and Painting With came out during the sporadic Obama years when Indie bands were no longer sure what to do with their hands; nor that Time Skiffs, whose rare vocal harmonies and gentle grooves carve out an oasis of calm amidst our rising ocean of chaos^[3]both literally and metaphorically, is a product of our present historical moment.^[4]Certainly the raincoats on the boats moving across the cover art–literally, in the case of the digital version–are intended to evoke an escape from the storm.

Some context: In grad school I read “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” an influential 1945 study by the American art critic Joseph Frank, wherein he posits that so-called “primitive” art periodically arises not due to any sudden lack of skill or development, but during eras of great turmoil.  “Modern” art, for Frank, emerges when humanity does not feel in tune with the universe anymore, and there thus arises a need to impose some sort of spatial order upon the chaos, to create realms of pure abstraction wherein the artist can escape the caprices of nature and/or modernity, by moving instead into some shapeless, formless Platonic ideal that transcends the horrors of history.

This thesis is Frank’s attempt to account for how the European art world went from producing paintings of such incredible detail, elegance, and hyper-realism as this:

 Or this:

Or this:

To then in the early 20th century abruptly start painting far more like this:

 Or this:

Or this:

 Or this:

We also in the early 20th century go from writing poetry more or less like this:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art far more lovely and temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”^[5]William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18,” 1609

To something much more like this:

“Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.”^[6]TS Eliot, “The Wasteland,” 1922

Orchestral music also goes from something self-consciously beautiful like this in the late-19th century:

To something far more abrasive like this in the early-20th:

The popular reading for this shift is that, in the ever increasing velocity of our modern age with its emphasis on novelty and convenience above all else, that our artists likewise abandoned the hard work of technique and skill, to instead embrace the cheap and easy shock of splattered paint and the like in their mad dash to be the next new thing.  That aspect of modernity may or may not be an influence as well, but Joseph Frank suspects that something far more profound is occurring here.

Specifically, Frank critiques the lazy evolutionary model wherein art supposedly progresses inexorably from cave etchings, to hieroglyphs, to pictograms, to portraits, to photo-realism; such an assumption claims that anything other than the hyper-detail of 18th century portraiture is more “primitive,” that any turn towards abstraction is a step backwards, a sign of our civilization’s decadence and degradation.   Instead, argues Frank, abstraction and realism have nothing to do with a civilization’s relative “development,” and everything to do with that particular civilization’s feeling of harmony with the Universe, metaphorically speaking.  Those older “realistic” paintings–so elegant, so graceful, so well-balanced according to the golden mean–were a sign that the artists felt in tune with the universe, that there was a place for everything and everything was in its place, that they lived in a world of absolute order, beginning with an immutable God above all, who ruled atop a divine chain-of-being in a descending hierarchy of anointed Kings, Dukes, Lords, Barons, Counts, Yeomen, and Peasants, all residing in a carefully ordered cosmos designed and run by a Great Clockmaker of perfect rationality.

Such, needless to say, is no longer the Universe we feel we live in.

The shift begins right around the turn of the 20th century:

-1899 is when Freud’s On the Interpretation of Dreams firmly established that we are not whole beings, that there is a split between our conscious and unconscious selves, that we are an irreconcilable mess of contradictory impulses, repressions, and neuroses;

-Nietzsche’s death in 1900 precipitated the mass-readings of his works, which firmly established in the Western mind that the existence of God is no longer a given, and religion has been on the defensive ever since^[7]Certainly when a Christian movie studio produces a string of films entitled God’s Not Dead, it is because they are struggling against the increasingly broad consensus that He is.;

-1905 is when Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity, which upended all established Newtonian physics and blew up the idea that the Universe is carefully ordered at all, that in fact all of existence is a far more bizarre and inscrutable place than we ever thought;

-and of course the First World War destroyed forever the assumption that there was anything intrinsically superior–morally, ethically, or otherwise–about Western Civilization in the first place^[8]which would only be exasperated by the even greater horrors of World War II..

Unsurprisingly then, argues Frank, that amidst all this great upheaval wherein the Universe itself feels unsettled and man no longer knows his place in the cosmos, art likewise turns towards the “Primitive,” the simplified, the bold, the energetic and the percussive, in an attempt to cut through and beat back the chaos, and to recover a much more elemental expression of life and vitality amongst all the smothering and anesthetizing complexity of modern civilization.

This has all been a long, long preamble towards me reminiscing on the Indie Music I was listening to well over a decade ago, at the height of the Iraq War, in a post-9/11 world gone mad–another era when we all felt out of sync with the Universe.  Certainly I do not think it a coincidence that Animal Collective first rose to prominence within the Indie world shortly after the invasion of Iraq; go listen to the freak-folk of 2004’s “SungTongs,” or the beating pulse of 2005’s “Feels,” or the stripped-down ambient noise of 2003’s “Campfire Songs.”  There was just something so primal–so “primitive,” to use Joseph Frank’s word–about what they were doing.  For all their artistic ambition and advanced experimentation, I even dare say there was something childlike about them, in their sense of wonderment, their desire to try everything, to not be bounded by any preconceived notions of how things should or ought to be.  In Animal Collective we had the all-too-rare opportunity to see life as though it were new–the perfect antidote to a world gone mad.

Though there is scarcely a political bone in Animal Collective’s body, I deeply suspect that their sound could only have arisen in response to the George W. Bush administration, and that could only have found an audience and risen to prominence in such a time of turmoil. As Pitchfork once put it:

“Despite its futuristic sheen, Animal Collective’s music has always evoked a primitive kind of purity. Early on they wore masks—a gesture that connected them not only to the lucid dreams of playtime but to traditions of shamanism and present-day Mardi Gras, where people hide their faces not to disguise their natures but reveal them.[…] Modern guys seeking a spiritual basement deep below the civilized self.”

Joseph Frank himself could have written those same words about any number of Modernist artists. 

And Animal Collective was hardly the outlier, but the rule: remember that the 2000s was also the era of “Screamo-Emo,” whose primal screams were a catharsis against that decade of destruction and war; it was also when the high, glistening polish of late-90s Boy Bands and Nu-Metal–themselves vestiges of the post-Cold War “end of history” when we all naively thought the world was at last orderly–gave way to Garage Rock revivalism, what with The White Stripes pairing the primal drum-beats of Meg White against Jack White’s wailing vocals; or when that other 2-piece roots-rock revival act The Black Keys sang menacingly about our “Strange Days;” it was when TV on the Radio declared “I was a lover/before this war,” and The Strokes belted out “The room is on fire and she’s fixing her hair,” and Interpol crooned about serial killers on “Evil;” it’s when Modest Mouse shout-sang about a world at large where all we can do is resignedly “Float On;” it was also the era when Arcade Fire rose to popularity with a guy beating a drum and tambourine on stage while the band cried out the soaring chorus to “Wake Up.”

In all of these examples, any sort of pretense towards technical skill or complexity is eschewed in favor of the primal drum beat, the crying shout, bold strokes, tribal unison, and simple forms–because “time is out of joint,”^[9]Hamlet Act I scene v the universe is in chaos, and, as Joseph Frank diagnosed it, the artists instinctively push back against the complexity as fiercely and primaly as they can.

Nor do I find it coincidental that Animal Collective hit their high-point–critically, commercially, and artistically–in 2009 specifically, with the aforementioned release of Merriweather Post Pavilion.  At the risk of hyperbole, it is easily one of the most gorgeous albums of the new millennium’s first 10 years.  Here, they weren’t just experimenting for its own sake anymore, but had set out to make something stunningly beautiful with their sonic palate, and succeeded beyond dreams.  It was the moment when all their sounds clicked, and justified all their sonic experiments since the year 2000.

But why did this album happen in 2009?  Did it just take them that long for their sound to “evolve?” Again, let us break ourselves of that lazy evolutionary model, and instead remember that most Indie Bands lean leftish by nature, and that 2009 featured the inauguration of our first black president in Barack Obama, the reclamation of the House and Senate for the Democrats, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the formal repudiation of the entire Bush Administration, and the purported winding down of the Iraq War.  For the Lefties at least, it was a moment of great cosmic convergence, a feeling that the Universe made sense again. This was also the era, for example, when TV on the Radio released the unironically upbeat “Golden Age,” and when the political punk band Bomb the Music Industry! recorded the stunningly gorgeous Vacation.  “England hath long been mad”^[10]Richard III Act V scene v and so had America, but was so no longer! For that one brief shining moment, we finally felt back in tune with the cosmos (not for naught was Merriweather‘s penultimate track entitled “No More Running“).  And for me at least, Merriweather Post Pavilion was the soundtrack for that moment.

Of course it didn’t–couldn’t–last; partisan ranker quickly reasserted itself, Congress became split again the following year, and all those foreign wars just kept limping along.  But nevertheless the shift into the Obama administration still threw off the cathartic “primitivism” of Bush-era Indie Rock.  The White Stripes broke up and Jack White got professional drummers for his solo career, and he hasn’t sounded nearly as vital or interesting since; The Black Keys also adopted a conventional, full-sized back-up band as they went mainstream; the Strokes, Interpol, and Modest Mouse largely just faded away; Emo became a punchline; Arcade Fire turned to disco; TV on the Radio’s last 3 albums sounded increasingly, well, like Pop albums (Nine Types of Light could’ve just been another nameless R&B record), cleansed of all the wild discordance that marked their first two discs.

This is all relevant because over the course of the century’s second decade, there concurrently arose a movement in music criticism known as “Poptimism,” wherein the sort of critics who once tried to out-do each other as to who could champion the most obscure band came full circle, and began to unironically sing the praises of Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Adele, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, etc., as the true musical innovators of our time, claiming that to deny their musical genius was but a shallow form of contrarian snobbery, if not outright misogyny and racism.^[11]Pithfork even began reviewing Taylor Swift releases. Suddenly, the critics we once sought to shame us away from the dull banality of Pop music were now trying to shame us back towards it–but to be fair, if the Indie Bands all just sounded like Pop Bands now anyways, well then why even bother turning from Pop in the first place?

Animal Collective for their part quickly moved away from Pop melodies after Merriweather, but…it just wasn’t the same, either.  Their follow-up Centipede Hz was certainly a pivot back towards dense musical collages and experimentation, but as noted earlier, it just felt so much more forced; there wasn’t that same sense of joie de vivre, of childlike wonder. It didn’t sound daring, only try-too-hard. The spell had been broken. 

And then 2016’s Painting With was a retreat back towards the Poppier, to sound like everyone else, a sort of sonic throwing in of the towel. Fun, sure, but nothing transcendent, nothing that escapes you away into Platonic realms of pure abstraction.  It no longer felt childlike, but rather like it was written for children–which is something different entirely.  It’s as though they were producing songs for Yo Gabba Gabba, which, while not necessarily a bad thing, is not the same as writing as though they were children. Granted, these guys had all grown old enough to be Dads themselves, and besides, what band has ever sustained their creative streak over 16 years?^[12]Goodness, that’s twice as long as the Beatles even existed! But they nevertheless still illustrated the conundrum for the Bush-era Indie artist: if the Universe no longer feels quite out of joint anymore, then what is the Modernist artist supposed to do anymore?

Just wait, is all.

I have students, certified Gen Zers, who when asked what their favorite pop-culture decade is, have begun to say “mid-2000s Indie”–by which they generally mean Arcade Fire’s first album, Modest Mouse, and The Strokes. This of course makes me feel old; but it is also worth noting that, in the 6 years since Animal Collective’s last LP came out, a small yet growing contingent of young people have begun to feel after something more elemental, primal, and apropos of the times we live in than whatever contemporary Pop music has provided them as of yet–and it’s not hard to understand why.

For we’ve swiftly been reminded of what a disjointed Universe looks like, haven’t we–and it didn’t even take all that long. The Syrian refugee crisis, the rise of Trump and a re-invigorated White Supremacist movement, the Muslim travel bans, the child prisons, the literal Nazi marches, the George Floyd protests, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the attempted coup of January 6th 2021, the global rise in authoritarianism and xenophobia, the global supply-chain crisis, global inflation, global warming, mega-droughts, mega-storms, record-breaking wildfires–all of this, all of this, even amidst our semi-recovering economy and the best Labor market since the end of WWII, the Universe has once again felt chaotic and disjointed.

Hence why I also don’t feel it coincidental that Animal Collective finally got their mojo back in the early-2020s specifically; as they said in a recent Rolling Stone article, the band members first began to reconnect and recover their childlike “return-to-high-school energy” while collaborating together on the soundtrack to the 2018 audiovisual album Tangerine Reef, a film about environmental destruction–they no longer had to force that feeling of “time is out of joint” like they did on Centipede Hz, but were once again feeling it naturally, deep down in their guts, all over again. We all have.

I suspect (perhaps even hope) that a fresh wave of neo-Modern “Primitivists” are on their way, and that the Poptimists will soon be left wondering why they ever let themselves think, even briefly, that the Universe was ever so simply ordered in the first place. Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs might just turn out to be a precursor, a quiet warning shot, of what may yet be to come.^[13]Here I will also mention that I didn’t stream Time Skiffs, but paid money to own it as well. Old habits die hard.

Now, what does any of this have to do with the Church or the Gospel? Recall once more how the 1990s-era of Gordon B. Hinkley optimism and exponential membership growth and massive Temple-building projects also left us LDS-folk feeling complacent, victorious, unstoppable, like the world was well-ordered and our continued growth assured. We knew with a surety that we were the stone uncut from the mountain rolling forth to fill the Earth.

We no longer feel that way anymore, either, do we; we have not been immune to larger trends of declining religiosity in the First World. And if an increasing number of our youth are feeling after 2000s-era Indie for something that Pop music at present does not give them, well then, as our current youth retention rates indicate, so too are an increasing number of them feeling after something else that the Church at present does not offer them.

What worked before isn’t working anymore; and if all over the rapid, hitherto-unthinkable changes that have occurred under the Russel M. Nelson administration–to home-teaching, to the three-hour block, to the ethnic diversity of the Q12, to the Temple ceremony itself–have been any clue, the Brethren feel this as well. Jefferey R. Holland has repeatedly addressed gross income inequality, Russel M. Nelson racism, and M. Russel Ballard global warming, in recent General Conferences. They are no longer being complacent. Nor can we.

Although I also have rolled my eyes at President Nelson’s monomania for the “true name of the Church,” it is worth noting that he is (even if only inadvertently) re-centering the fact that we are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that we are at heart an apocalyptic religion^[14]both in the sense of destruction but also the old Greek word for Revelation, and that the Book of Mormon–about the destruction of an entire civilization–was written for our day. But they have been no fire-and-brimstone doomsday preachers, no–they too, like Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, have attempted to carve out an oasis of calmness in a rising ocean of chaos.

As Neal A. Maxwell once said, yes Armageddon is coming, but so is Adam-ondi-Ahman. We are looking forward to a new heavens and a new earth–but that also means we must be making something new in the here and now, to prepare for it. (As the Savior himself once said, Ye cannot put new wine into old bottles…)^[15]Matt. 9:17

Our LDS artists must also rise up and try something new–more “primitive,” more wild, more passionate and chaotic and innovative–if we are to rise to the moment as well. To paraphrase the old Orson F. Whitney quote, we not only can, but must have Animal Collectives of our own.