REVIEW: Animal Collective, Tangerine Reef

Animal Collective, Tangerine Reef (Domino)

What drugs are responsible for this? Admittedly this is a half-assed review of the 11th album by these indie/experimental kingpins, which is meant to be audiovisual. Tangerine Reef is being released on Aug. 17 and my advance copy did not include the film (by Coral Morphologic), which is described as “time-lapse and slow pans across surreal aquascapes of naturally fluorescent coral and cameos by alien-like reef creatures.” This project is supposedly a commemoration of 2018, the Year of the Reef; there are three songs with “coral” in the title. I hope that the accompanying visuals are awesome (or that this whole thing is a joke) because the audio is a tepid sonic soup, spiked with some sort of pharmaceutical downer. 3/10 Trial Track: “Coral by Numbers” (Lorraine Carpenter)