Animal Collective – ODDSAC

ODDSAC is a collaborative feature film between Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion heroes Animal Collective, and long term co-conspirator and visual artist Danny Perez. The 50 minute visual/audio marriage is a hypnotic kaleidoscope of contrasting sound, weird visuals and off the wall acting.

Many musicians have tried to pull together visuals, music and art – Neil Young’s Human Highway and Elbow’s work with the Soup Collective being two such examples. Neither however managed blur the lines between the two disciplines quite so much as ODDSAC. A smattering of unreleased Animal Collective material sits inbetween collections of sounds, brought together to resemble music, which flash and flicker out of time but in sync with the images on screen.

There’s a nod towards Joy Division in the opening song with dark hollow vocals that sound lost and anxious, tinged with regret perhaps at the foreboding of the story that is about to unfold.

There are five tracks recognisable as straight forward songs, all with that brilliant rurality that the band possess. The main narrative of the film, bizarrely, is told with droning, trippy pieces of music that do the majority of the story-telling legwork, allowing the main tracks to stand out on their own merit. Other tracks focus on acousticity and there’s even a moment of beauty in the final track which has bright sweeping harmonies which are a re-assuring shock to the system in the wake of the uber-psychedelia that precedes them.

If Jackson Pollock had worked in coloured lines of electricity, he’d appreciate Perez’s work. Dream-like sequences show grinding colours pixelate and jump in synchronisation with the Animal Collective soundtrack.

There are ‘live’ sequences with an evil protagonist resembling a haunted looking clown with a Garth Brooks pony tail, in which he seeks to row across a lake and to eat alive a family who are camping in a forest.

The film flips to Blair Witch territory (thankfully not in black and white) with shaking camera work where we see the predatory character beaten by sunlight and slowly oozing with orange, blue and black paint and boiling away to his timely demise.

In one of the most sensible sequences, a character dressed in Jimmy Saville-like attire with matching white droopy hair is seen clambering over rocks to build his drum kit in order to beat the living hell out of it – it can only be presumed this is Panda Bear.