Today Animal Collective announce FEELS LIVE in New York and Los Angeles; the band will play their seminal 2005 LP in full on October 22 at Queens’ Knockdown Center and October 24 at LA’s Fonda Theatre. The concerts will mark the first time Animal Collective has played together in four years. Tickets will be available via artist and local pre-sale this Thursday, September 10 at 10am local time, and general on-sale this Friday, September 11 at 10am local.
Last year, Animal Collective celebrated the 20th anniversary of Feels with a limited edition reissue of the album featuring a bonus disc featuring nine B-sides and previously unreleased demos. Feels 20th Anniversary is available to purchase and stream via Domino.
Animal Collective shares:
“When we celebrated the Feels 20th Anniversary edition last year, people often asked, ‘Why aren’t you performing it live?’ It was a good question, and honestly, one we just hadn’t asked ourselves. We were so used to our schedules not lining up that we didn’t consider it. But yeah, why didn’t we? The celebration felt incomplete to you all, and to us too. ‘We can relearn this album,’ we said. ‘We can find old loops, tunings, pedals, and a working minidisc player to grab old sounds. Then maybe if a small window of time opens up…’ Now it has, and we’re going to play the album in full (as well as some extras from the time) in NYC and LA this October. A 21st birthday party. We know only playing two shows in the two biggest cities in the states leaves a lot of you without an option to come out. We sincerely wish everyone who wants to see these shows could do so, and we’re sorry we can’t make that happen for you. As we said above, we only have a short window to get together right now. We’ll see how it goes and how the future shapes up down the road. For those who can come out, accept our deepest thanks, and we’ll see you down by the swimming pool.”
Feels fell in the middle of Animal Collective’s extraordinary ascent in the early 2000s from indie experimentalists to one of contemporary music’s most original and influential artists; it followed the band’s 2004 breakthrough album Sung Tongs and preceded the records that would propel them to mainstream success, 2007’s Strawberry Jam and 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Recorded in Seattle with engineer Scott Colburn, Feels saw Animal Collective return to a quartet with Josh “Deakin” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz after Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox recorded Sung Tongs as a duo. Upon its release, Entertainment Weekly called Feels “breathlessly giddy and shamelessly trippy,” adding, “Somewhere up there, John Lennon and Timothy Leary are grinning.” “Feels gives hope to young bands who want to make beautiful noise but refuse to color within the lines,” wrote Rolling Stone. Pitchfork would eventually name the album one of the best of the 2000s, hailing its “sense of exuberance as big and as purposeless as a forest, sometimes joyfully savage and sometimes softly haunting, but always beyond genre or strategy or intention.”
