Animal Collective
Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished [Remastered 2023]
DOMINO
Every music genre has a legend. Every band has a first step out of the bedroom. Their 2000 debut Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished is where Animal Collective rolled out of bed looking as sturdy as they could at such an early stage in their career. They would soon after grow in stature to become a Billboard-charting indie behemoth on 2007’s Strawberry Jam and the iconic 2009 follow-up Merriweather Post Pavilion.
The de facto debut is a moonless fairy tale of chiming alien transmissions and chamber-folk malice. Spirit was originally released in a tiny CD-only pressing on the group’s own Animal imprint in August 2000 and was credited to just Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox prior to the collective being formalized. The reissue features crisp remastered audio and the intriguing slipstream EP A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket, which contains five previously unheard songs including a back-porch cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” The EP was also recorded in 1999 and mixed by Animal Collective’s most infrequent bandmate, Josh “Deakin” Dibb.
Looking back after two decades, Spirit begins to trace the group’s long shadow of influence on the blog-rock scene. Animal Collective largely understood the type of band they wanted to be from the jump—Avey Tare’s manic vocals and the ramshackle percussion from Panda Bear were both there, and they just kept experimenting on the road with new instruments and vocal inflections. The magical realism drawn from mixing genres was present from the beginning.
Spirit opens with the phrase “Want to hear a secret? / I know one” and unfurls 15 laments for adolescence withering under the newfound pressures of adulthood. The gnarled synthesizers heard in the beginning of opener “Spirit They’ve Vanished” mark a bold entrance for a record during this period when electronic and pop music collided in bedrooms more than on dancefloors for aspiring songwriters. As they’ve done many times in their career, Lennox and Portner lean into prog jams, which usually works more in the live setting. “Bat You’ll Fly” and the near-13-minute coda “Alvin Row” pay off even if the voyages are a touch languorous.
Beyond the regular jamming, the sweet spots come from the pair’s strong grasp on psychedelic folk-rock. The noteworthy example is still “Chocolate Girl,” an Elephant 6–like charmer that recounts a childhood crush through a pounding melody. Elsewhere, “April and the Phantom” slams you with noise, but also offers a poppy slice of trippy guitarwork. The lyrics recount yet another dark fantasy about a girl named April fleeing her mother by escaping into the woods.
Lennox and Portner have remained the two stylistic poles of Animal Collective to this day, and their eerie tales continue to be just as untamed and widescreen as they were in 2000. They met in high school in Baltimore, and Spirit was recorded in Portner’s bedroom over the summer while on break from NYU as he fought cycles of depression from claustrophobic New York City life. The partnership with Panda Bear begins here with a spry flourish and an early wellspring of melodic, emotive, and beat-heavy ideas—all of which helped to set the outfit apart from the burgeoning “freak folk” scene of the early 2000s.
Animal Collective still roams in that twilight zone between pop and noise, and Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is where they first embarked on that musical quest. The band’s cult fandom sprang from this pivotal moment, and their strong debut will always be the kind of release you grip onto like a madcap rollercoaster without a lap bar. Each twist and turn is just as rickety and enthralling as you remember.
