By: Maxwell Paparella

Last year's excellent Strawberry Jam saw beloved Brooklyn experimentalists Animal Collective become full-fledged pop stars. They successfully translated their swinging, shrieking, shaking primal madness to a primarily electronic medium. One can still hear in its bleeps and bloops the same sense of youthfulness and joy that must have been discovered the first time these guys took their guitars out of tune.

This may not be Animal Collective at their best, but then what is? The beautiful thing about this band is that they are of that rare breed of musicians who strive not to make better music, but different music. They are also of that even rarer breed who let the former coincide with the latter.

It's hard to believe that the first three songs of Water Curses were recorded during the Strawberry Jam sessions. Four songs and eighteen minutes long, this EP is the most mature work the group has released to date. When seen in the context of a review, the word "mature" can usually be read "boring." This is not the case here. Animal Collective have held on to their childlike wonder and exultation, but now they want to want to talk about what those concepts mean to them as adults.

Curses starts with a gurgle and a splash. The title track is an up-tempo ditty that sounds more like a barefoot run through the stream than any kind of curse. The pace slows a bit with "Street Flash," a thoughtful, reverb-laced story about a husband trying to tell his wife we he is home so late. "All the clocks around the town had died," Avey Tare halfheartedly explains. Next up is "Cobwebs," which enlists sounds of creaking stairs, airplanes, and an ominous rumbling. Here, too, are the electronic noises their previous album made us crave. The EP ends with "Seal Eyeing," an ambient, piano-led stumble through what seems to be a lament about global warming ("But the ice should not be melting everywhere / Swimming around and melting on the shore.")

What makes the album's sound really shine are the subtleties; The splashing and slurping in the title track, the woman crying in the background of "Street Flash," the lazy guitar on "Cobwebs," the cannonball sounds in "Seal Eyeing." This is an album of layers, best enjoyed over repeated listens. Its cohesiveness, in particular, is admirable. No four-song EP should be expected to sound this well-conceived. The guys play up the "water" theme almost to a fault; gurgles and spits can be heard on every track.

The group takes this between-albums opportunity to showcase a softer, slower, yet somehow more immediate sound. Avey Tare's vocals are buried under a few layers of synths and samplers, but this lends more gravity to them than when they are simply shouted in your ear. He will still yell when he needs to get a point across, of course, but for the most part he has taken to a supple, sing-songy tone.

If Jam is the three-ring circus, Curses is the stage hands taking down the tent afterwards. They smoke cigarettes and talk about their kids and their mortgages and their desires. This is a band that can now speak with more authority about age and all that it entails. Animal Collective has not gotten bitter, mind you, just wiser.

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