Tickley Feather

Leave it up to the strangely angled minds of those Animal Collective folks to discover Annie Sachs, or the titular Tickley Feather, and her mini, lo-fi electronic nuggets. With 20 songs in around 30 minutes, there’s not a lot of time for things to fully bloom into that Panda Bear psychedelic swirliness but there are some little gems among the massive rough. "The Python” is less than two minutes long but it features one of Sachs’s most confident vocal performances and her programmed beats actually break out of the lo-fi constraints, if only for a fleeting moment. "The Daylight” oddly reminds of "He Needs Me” by Shelly Duvall, which means it’s an entrancing, unique and compellingly idiosyncratic composition, and the strongest thing here. Finally, "Tonight Is the Night” might be the closest thing to a dance song that Sachs can come up with and, again, it’s nice, but in that je ne sais quoi way. The rest is really just a peculiar assortment of vocal samples, Sachs’s late night musings with various electronics and many other odds and sods. Not quite fulfilling to be necessary yet in the few moments where it’s delightfully offbeat it’s utterly original in its own twee way.