Animal Collective: The Scientists

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASS BIRD

Now Animal Collective headline festivals in front of 20,000 people and are regarded as arguably the most influential art-rock group working on any scale. "I consider them to be the most important band of our time," says fellow abstract-pop purveyor Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound. "I seriously think they're the best band on the planet."

Charting their influence is a complicated ordeal, in part because it expands beyond sound to include certain fashions (deranged nativist chic) and philosophies (earnest unstudied experimentalism) that now count as common in the underground. But it's safe to say that without Animal Collective, underground music would have a lot less yawping, gnawing, and writhing -- not to mention dreamy patches of modern-psychedelic splatter and quasi-calypso chimes.

The story of Animal Collective's sound -- which they started making with guitars and drums, but now relies more on samplers and various console gear they tweak and twiddle -- begins with horror movies. Portner and Weitz, who became friends in ninth grade, grew up transfixed by the soundtracks to The Shining and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. "To me it was interesting in a fantastical way," says Portner. "The way you would listen was the way you'd read a choose-your-own-adventure novel." But it wasn't until their experiments migrated from Portner's cluttered suburban home to the stage that Animal Collective's cult began to form.

"The first time we played with them, it wasn't really musical; it was more like a performance," says Eric Copeland of the Brooklyn noise band Black Dice. "Brian was playing in a tent, so you couldn't see him, and Dave was doing this sort of mind-reading skit with either a fake or real dead bat on a string. He called this woman out of the audience and poured a gallon of milk on her head."

Rob Carmichael, who put out the group's disorienting second album, Danse Manatee, on his Catsup Plate label in 2001 and continues to work with them designing artwork, remembers a show during which Lennox played drums in and out of time. "I couldn't figure out if it was a Shaggs sort of thing where he didn't know how to drum," Carmichael says, "but I was amazed when it turned out to be intentional. I definitely had the feeling that they were all scholars of music who didn't just happen upon their sound. They wanted that air of mystery, which was why veiling their identities was important to them. Although when that became an expectation and then a gimmick, they just dropped all of it."

Abby Portner, Dave's sister and herself a musician in the New York band Rings, remembers ramshackle shows from the very beginning ("They were all in underwear with blood and feathers, very feedback-y"), but also a mix of focus and drive that undergirded Animal Collective's slow, methodical rise. "They were pretty ambitious," she says. "They always thought, 'If we play once in a while and have it be insane, that would be more memorable than just playing every weekend.' They really wanted to make stuff and be heard. It's the same way now as it was then."

Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective's ninth album, marks the latest development for a band that has changed radically by the record, each one simultaneously weirder and more approachable than the one before. Nobody would mistake anything on the new one for sounding the least bit conventional, but it's easy to hear certain parts -- Portner delivering love notes in "In the Flowers" or Lennox leading the ecstatic sing-along in "Brothersport" -- as newly engaged and engaging variations on classic pop.

Or at least a kind of pop that makes sense at a s&eactue;ance.