Avey Tare & Kria Brekkan

With both the Animal Collective’s Avey Tare and Panda Bear releasing back-to-back side-projects on the band’s Paw Tracks imprint, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the two. In fact, if you can only afford to buy one of these albums (assuming you still buy albums) then spend your hard-earned money on Panda Bear’s excellent Person Pitch. That said, Avery Tare’s Pullhair Rubeye, a collaboration with ex-Mùm Kria Brekkan (aka Kristin Anna Valtysdottir), is not a bad record. It’s just nowhere near as ambitious as Panda Bear’s. Much like his other side-project, Terrestrial Tones, here Avey Tare (aka Dave Portner) uses the downtime from Animal Collective to go weird, in the haphazard and, frankly, easy sense of the word. While the 37-minute disc does provide some amiable psych folk, the results are made tediously self-conscious by the fact that much of the vocals and instrumental tracks have been played backwards for that slanted, fluid texture that rudimentary trick affords. Not a bad idea when used in moderation but here it’s pretty much the modus operandi for the whole album. And, hey, this is what side-projects are all about: to flush out those preoccupations that don’t make sense in the main band. In the end, Pullhair Rubeye is not so much experimental as it is quirky.