Ah, frontloading: that recording industry phenomenon by which this reviewer’s twelve-year-old paws were ensured easy access to Dovetail Joint’s superlative single “Level on the Inside” after having mistakenly shelled out for the full LP. Let this allusion to my youthful indiscretion show you just which level of classy major-label ploy we’re dealing with, here. Not, altogether, the league of chicanery one might expect from those aural craftsmen in the Animal Collective. No, wait, I can prove this with science: go ahead, name a track from the only other Animal Collective record anyone’s ever purchased. “‘Kids on Holiday!’” you offer. Track five. “Oh! ‘We Tigers!’” Track nine. There’s the one about winning a marmoset (or something) near the front, but speaking generally, Sung Tongs’ solid gold hits were pretty evenly distributed.

So here I am, reviewing an Animal Collective record whose clear intention is to lure me in. I suppose the accepted convention among my peers is to simply refer to changes like these as making the product the band’s “most accessible to date.” It is, don’t get me wrong. It just feels weird. And goddammit, it’s luring me.

Feels starts with the rolling intro to “Did You See the Words,” an Animal Collective song that goes somewhere. Granted: once it arrives, it appears to like its “whoa, whoa, whoa” destination so much it sticks around for a while. I’m not about hold that against them, though. Led by a pounding snare, Messrs. Tare and Bear manufacture a head-bobbing chorus out of swirling guitars and swooping backup vocals, all punctuated with a twinkling piano arpeggio.

The second track, “Grass,” is Feels’ real standout. It bounces! It has a hummable melody! Its structure could realistically be outlined without recursion! Did I mention it bounces, big-band style? Truthfully, the song isn’t really held up by a lot of instrumentation, but the Collective’s typical tremolo guitar swash arsenal isn’t missed here. This is the band in top form and, having been in the catalog for a while, a justified fan favorite on the last tour.

Fans of the traditional Animal Collective theory of composition and instrumentation (“Hey, let’s add more moans and flanges!”) need not worry, though. The middle of the album builds on prior sounds. “Flesh Canoe” takes a cue from Paw Tracks labelmate Arial Pink’s clanging reverb for a bit of a mop’e, before “The Purple Bottle” brings the drums back in, and seems to enjoy doing it.

The first time this reviewer heard “Bees,” he wrote it off as being more a convenient aural mass than a song – an eminently skippable placeholder not unlike Sung Tongs’ “Visiting Friends.” He was pleased, however, when, at approximately halfway in, the song’s beatific chant more than justifies its inclusion. Regrettably, the promisingly litigable “Daffy Duck” steps in for the same role, and takes up five more minutes in doing so. Before that can happen, however, “Banshee Beat” ensures that the Collective will load the drum machine back up for the Feels tour but, blessedly, avoids the screeches promised by both the track’s title and freak-folk’s “freer” element. Among the album’s closers, “Loch Raven” wishes fervently that Aphex Twin had written it, while “Turn Into Something” may as well be the good bits from all the previous tracks, all played at once. It’s catchy.

So what’s happened to Animal Collective to make them so (relatively) well-behaved? Not held to the earthy acoustics of 2003′s Campfire Songs or the melodic folk wisdom of Vashti Bunyan, the band’s recent collaboratrix for the Prospect Hummer EP, the boys should be free to run around a bit. Maybe it was bringing sometime-Collectivists Geologist and Deaken to the studio, but from seeing their live show as a four-piece in April, I detected no sort of sedative influence whatsoever. Whatever happened, Animal Collective have produced this record under the shadow of Sung Tongs. It’s certainly at its most widely listenable in the first few tracks, but the entire album bears the sheen of a band who know what they’re trying to do. Frontloaded or not, and for better or worse, they did it.

Reviewed by Dan Ray