What he’s presented us with, essentially, is the skeleton of Animal Collective’s fleeting creativity, stripped down to its roots, revealing that even at its rawest, purest form the music still has an instinctive grasp of sincere emotion and beauty.
Sleep Cycle is an album about confronting those doubts, about climbing that mountain without dwelling on earlier difficulties, or timeliness, or imperfections. It’s about realizing what you want.
One of the things that works so well on this six-song album is that it shaves away some of the psych rock of the parent band and lets the fragmentations remain.
Unassuming and minimal in its execution with a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts, Sleep Cycle establishes itself as a captivating journey inwards towards a destination that’s as comforting as it is reaffirming.
Sleep Cycle represents, and unintentionally so, a creative rebirth that goes against Animal Collective’s increasingly evanescent creativity. It took long enough, but the investment was worth it.
It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes—but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.
Organically composed and hovering in the astral, Sleep Cycle is an escape with the illusory contours of a dream.
The short album feels fluid and fragile, but highly focused, letting decades' worth of energy and life experiences elegantly flow through, occasionally building up to a few supremely joyous moments.
Deakin seriously needs to do more vocals on the next AnCo releases. This thing is just so beautiful throughout.
A hell of a lot better than Painting With. Deakin stayed inside the boundaries of good weird, which the rest of AnCo unfortunately failed to do this year.
Definitely the best solo album from an Animal Collective member yet, just wish it was longer and had less pointless interludes. (Shadow Mine, should have been a proper track like Golden Chords/Footy)
It says something about Animal Collective as a band that they have three members (maybe four, I haven't listened to Geologist's solo stuff) that release exceptional solo projects. But that's not to take away from Deakin because this album stands firmly on its own. Despite only spanning 33 minutes, it feels fully fleshed out and remains incredibly engaging, throughout. Switching moods and sounds on a number of different tracks but never losing focus on the general 'feeling', which I think is the ... read more
1 | Golden Chords 6:29 | 93 |
2 | Just Am 8:08 | 86 |
3 | Shadow Mine 1:15 | 65 |
4 | Footy 7:19 | 83 |
5 | Seed Song 3:12 | 79 |
6 | Good House 7:05 | 92 |
#30 | / | Pretty Much Amazing |
#47 | / | No Ripcord |