If you like Animal Collective then chances are that you’re already familiar with most of the absurdities the Tammys so fearless explored, without ever listening to them. You’ve embraced forays into childish screaming, drum explorations, and some of the most terrifying fucking noises a group called Animal Collective could ever make. Chances are you love this about them. You accept their differences, their elusiveness, and their totally ridiculous names. Maybe you’ve been fortunate enough to see them live, experiencing the raw emotion and sweat and (when I saw them) partial bear suits. Just remember, the Tammys did it first. Forty fucking years ago.

None of the members of Animal Collective are named Tammy, much to my eternal disappointment. However, they do at least have their own stupid name factor going on, with as many as five or six pseudonym-ed members working on any given recording, project, or tour. Their first full length, a double disc entitled Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished was recorded by core members Avey Tare and Panda Bear, and their latest effort adds Deakin, Geologist, and Doctess to the menagerie.

Feels is the most accessible/finely crafted album the group has released to date. With at least three full lengths under their belt and numerous EPs and various collaborations, the group is committed to pushing the boundaries of music, be it pop, indie, experimental, folk or whatever else they’re doing at the moment. While 2004’s “Sung Tongs” achieved critical acclaim and found its way onto many college radio and blogger top ten of 2004, some critics (Bornbackwards included [review]) felt the album’s middle was loaded down with obtuse and largely unenjoyable material, like a 12-minute song that consisted of only one chord and various sound effects.

Feels is the album I wished the Collective had made when I first heard Sung Tongs–it ditches the more self-indulgent material for genuine hooks and true songcraft. While prior albums made it a point to push boundaries, almost to the point of alienating new listeners, Feels draws listeners in demonstrating the group’s artistry and pop-sensibilities then flips it and reverses it. That’s right, Feels is fun to listen to, as wildly weird and truly enjoyable as “Tomorrow Never Knows” or “Egyptian Shumba” must have seemed to folks in the early ‘60s. The Collective have taken their wilder impulses and more bizarre sounds and managed to lasso them into the confines of real pop songs, to serve as moody intros, disconcerting outros, disjointed bridges, or mutant hooks. The rough patches have been filled in with velvety vocals, jangling guitar, and wacky … wackiness. If there’s one thing Animal Collective is good at (just one?) its deconstructing a song and breaking the rules you thought they had set for their own music. So here it is, an Animal Collective album that’s inviting.

The album starts off pleasantly enough with “Have You Seen the Words?” which begins lightly and grows more intricate and textured with the addition of vocals and chugging drums. As an album opener, “Words” sets the scene for a highly textured album with many different sounds and time changes going on at once. This approach makes for some of the most interesting music-induced imagery/hallucinations I’ve ever experienced, as the song starts with what sounds like a citar-drone, giving way to children laughing and a melancholy tinkling piano. None of these sounds are heard again in the song as a bouncy beat begins and the whispery melody is periodically interrupted by explosively shouted harmonies. At its end, the whole song merely turns into competing harmonies made out of cut-up syllables that shouldn’t really go together but somehow do, like three different doo-wop records playing at once to create one ϋber-whomp-bomp-aloo-bomp.

‘Words’ leads into another supremely catchy tune, “Grass”, a love song it seems, one of several on the album. Read the lyrics to this song and you might think it’s the Flaming Lips, but Wayne Coyne never talked like an animal. The constantly changing tempo and heavily layered vocals, guitar, and unidentifiable loops give way to a chorus that manages to make out-right screaming one of the catchiest pop hooks of the year. Running the gamut from children’s music to punk, “Grass” is a near-masterpiece of eccentric pop, and the Tammys would be proud, I’m sure.

The finest song on the album, “Purple Bottle,” is another playful love tune–with the word vomit in it of course. But when Animal Collective says vomit, you know they mean it, as a violent expulsion from the very bottom of your being, both physical and emotional. No imagery is off-limits and even in its sweetest song, Animal Collective manages to push boundaries and upset expectations. With equal elements of light and dark, from tickling piano to the thundering tribal drums that appear on nearly every track, the song embodies the group’s ability to embrace both variety and consistency.

With so many transforming songs, the only one that loses momentum is “Bees” which grinds along like a rusty bike chain. Distorted vocals, tinny guitar, pipe-sounding echoes and other indefinable deep-in-the-earth sounds, blur together into a droning waste of time that leaves little more impression than its name. “Bees” consists mostly of about five minutes of scraping harp strums, formless piano noodling, and a pointless, repetitive melody–its more a wash of sound than a song, with little change or direction to its credit. It’s an abrupt transition, taking us back down from the high of “Grass,” “Flesh Canoe,” and “Purple Bottle,” but “Bees” bleeds into “Banshee Beat” which takes what little energy “Bees” had and channels it back into a less-subconscious drone. “Banshee” starts a new train of thought with type-writer sounding percussion, delicate vocals, and a real melody emerging out of the unfathomable fog left over from “Bees”. Suddenly, it seems as though “Bees”, and the equal uninteresting first two minutes of “Banshee Beat” were just there to provide a brilliant contrast to sudden direction and delicately building tension provided once the tip-tapping beat finally–finally–fades in. Likewise, the hyper-screams of “Grass” become vulnerable and sparse on “Banshee Beat” but still find the opportunities for strength and depth, as the tension just softly builds to baby noises and wailing cries. “Banshee” balances the highs of the first half of the album and sets the tone for the slower second half.

Calmer tracks like “Daffy Duck” and “Loch Raven” round off the album with pretty sounds, and pretty vocals, although they can’t live up the incredibly highs of the album’s beginning, they easily beat most of the material off the second half of Sung Tongs These more subdued tracks lead up to the closer, “Turn into Something,” which ends “Feels” in a palindrome sort of way, reminiscent of both “Words” and “Grass” squeezed together into one song.

The album starts and ends with a pep and light mist of noise to round it off. Most of the tracks clock in over five minutes and the collective covers a lot of ground, touching on influences from African tribal rhythms to Can, Brian Eno, the Beach Boys, and My Bloody Valentine. You can find Feels on most Best-Of lists this year and expect Animal Collective to keep breaking molds, testing boundaries, and making mind-bending music in the future. It’d be interesting to know whether Animal Collective have even ever heard “Egyptian Shumba,” a song that sounds like a perfect lost track from Feels, only forty years too early.