Young Prayer

The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional Sung Tongs and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document Campfire Songs had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century American version of sacred music. It's an approach in which voices say more with music than they ever could with words, and it's why the Beach Boys transcended their dorky lyrics as easily as Animal Collective transcend unintelligibility.

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