Tangerine Reef
| Animal Collective
Tangerine Reef
Tangerine Reef is the eleventh studio album by American experimental pop band Animal Collective, released on August 17, 2018, through Domino. It is the band's first full-length release without Panda Bear, and was made in collaboration with art-science duo Coral Morphologic and in celebration of the International Year of the Reef. The album is accompanied by a film, which premiered on the band's website. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
Composed by Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin, AnCo’s second audiovisual album reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come.
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NME
Get in the sea: the new 'audio-visual' album from the New York-formed psychedelic kooksters is as unlistenable as it is boring, which is almost kind of an achievement.
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Paste Magazine
Tangerine Reef is best appreciated with that visual accompaniment, which is like if an iTunes visualizer went on a diving expedition. Material like “Buxom” and “Jake and Me” is woozy and expansive—watercolor synth pads, murmured vocals that float in a foggy space between melody and discernible speech—and somehow makes sense when paired with colorful time-lapse aquascapes: neon greens, bloody reds, brilliant blues. The fluorescent coral is in a constant state of movement. Sometimes it looks like it’s dancing. Other times, it quivers and sways, a mournful choreography.
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Drowned in Sound
The visuals – bright, fluorescent, and wildly colourful – are a juxtaposition to the darker and more nebulous feel of the record, but even that is an apt reflection of the muddy and foggy natures of sealife. The tracks themselves also evoke certain themes of longing, of uncertainty – of loneliness felt within the miles and miles of the underwater ocean.
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The Guardian
CM’s images are mesmeric, but it’s hard to imagine why you’d listen to this music on its own, except as the austere punishment our species deserves.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
We didn’t realize that Animal Collective had swam out to an island and were impossibly alone and trapped in their musicality, until it was too late. They were stuck out there.
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Soundblab
Again, as with other Animal Collective albums, it will not be everybody’s bag, nor will it be something that you simply cannot take off your music system, but it never goes below being intriguing and often reaches the heights (as with “Buffalo Tomato” and “Jake and Me”, for example) the trio (in this case a quintet) are known to be able to come up with.
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The 405
While Tangerine Reef inspires as a pseudo-political statement regarding the deteriorating environment at the hands of mankind, Animal Collective ultimately disappoints with this record—it’s yet another forgettable checkpoint within the band’s recent run.
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PopMatters
Tangerine Reef is a project that may likely polarize Animal Collective fans, and it may not be an ideal jumping-off point for anyone looking to discover this unique band, but it's a worthy addition to their catalog, and it supports a supremely important cause in this day and age.
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Sputnik Music
Songs that are pleasant throughout like Jake and Me, as well as Palythoa, are few and far between, which makes Tangerine Reef generally uninteresting. Sure, it looks gorgeous on the surface. But that doesn't mean all the stuff going on down below is just as impressive.
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Exclaim!
For fans of Animal Collective's trippier inclinations, Tangerine Reef is a pleasant bit of oceanic escapism. For new listeners or anyone looking for the next "My Girls," this is decidedly inessential.
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The Young Folks
While this album does have some unique qualities, Tangerine Reef’s central problem lies within its frame. The visual component of the album is truly stunning and in tandem with the album itself, is impressive at times. Unfortunately, the album portion of Tangerine Reef fails to fully realize its potential. It feels like a non-album chalked full of forgettable moments that culminate in a frustrating listening experience.
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Diandra Reviews It All
Vastly inquisitive and opening to imaginations, Animal Collective’s Tangerine Reef, as an album, can simply be describe into one word: marine. If you want your day to feel as engulfing, dangerous, and magnificent as the ocean then try Tangerine Reef.
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Daily Emerald
It might be a slog to some, and it is certainly weaker as a standalone audio-only album; however, as a complete audiovisual experience, this new Animal Collective project is mesmerizing. At the very least, “Tangerine Reef” gives hardcore Animal Collective fans an incentive to get high and watch stunning videos of marine life for an hour.
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The Line of Best Fit
Animal Collective’s Tangerine Reef sees the Baltimore-born experimental pop group collaborate with the art-science duo Coral Morphologic to commemorate the 2018 International Year of the Reef via a new, bespoke, audio-visual experience.
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WRBB Radio
That album was deeply textural, largely ambient, and very divisive – was it revolutionary or just noisy garbage? But at least that record had distinct songs and some replay value beyond creeping your friends out with footage of a sea slug. It wasn’t always pleasant to listen to, but that’s what made it interesting. Tangerine Reef, by comparison, is pretty unobjectionable, which means it’s not a bad album by any stretch. But it’s not great either.
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All Music
Like any visual album, the floating sounds here are probably best experienced in conjunction with the visuals they were created for, but even on their own, there's a calm power that grows as the various passages of Tangerine Reef fade in and out of one another.
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UNF Spinnaker
Animal Collective takes this oceanic theme to the limits of it’s potential by employing a synth-heavy approach, mimicking a tuneful underwater ecosystem. Weitz has a field day with synthetic composition, making the title’s homage completely deserved, and Portner takes advantage of the occasion by giving his vocals an almost-incomprehensible delivery à la Amen Dunes. This absence of clear vocals provides emphasis for the electronic sound work.
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Miami New Times
Coral Morphologic’s Miami studio is home to the fluorescent corals and alien-like creatures featured on the audiovisual album Tangerine Reef, which commemorates the 2018 International Year of the Reef.
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Pop Bollocks
Removing themselves of the normal restrictions of content and form Animal Collective have produced something in Tangerine Reef that blurs distinction between inner and outer worlds. This is where reality happens, and it’s wonderfully surreal.
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Cult MTL
I hope that the accompanying visuals are awesome (or that this whole thing is a joke) because the audio is a tepid sonic soup, spiked with some sort of pharmaceutical downer.
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Life4ever Media
This is a record which confirms them as artists and conductors, a serious business and one which could in no way be taken as just a hobby.
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NOW Toronto
Fans of AnCo’s more upbeat and animated works probably won’t love this album, but it is successful in its experimentation and as an affirmation that they have and always will have something unique to bring to the table.
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The Indiecator
Part soundtrack and part concept album, Animal Collective’s 11th effort flows between calm and distressing on its journey beneath the waves.
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Northern Transmissions
Animal Collective has always been about awe. Gazing with wonder at the world around you, at the people you know and love and lose, and astonishment at the changes you recognize mirrored in yourself.
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Earbuddy
Just when you thought Animal Collective's music was too fun...
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Rolling Stone
Indie rockers team with art-science duo Coral Morphologic for visual tone poem across surreal aquascapes of naturally fluorescent coral.
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The Student Playlist
Without Panda Bear for this latest audio-visual project with Coral Morphologic, Animal Collective produce a curious yet compelling suite of watery psychedelia in ‘Tangerine Reef’.
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Treble Zine
Tangerine Reef is at its most gripping and enthralling when it is serene. That’s the highest order it can strive to attain, and maybe that’s the intention. But a significant lack of dynamism, and any sense of immediacy or percussive accents leaves this album adrift in an aimless sea without its visual component.
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Spectrum Culture
Tangerine Reef is an ambient sort of thing that more closely resembles earlier Animal Collective releases like Danse Manatee or Water Curses.
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DIY Mag
A focus on improvisational playing and unique sounds provides a blissful atmosphere.
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The Fire Note
Tangerine Reef feels like more of a side project, and with this perspective, fans will probably be more open to the project.
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The Times
The latest album by this usually superb Baltimore group is the soundtrack to a nature movie on coral reefs. While it may enhance footage of colourful underwater kingdoms, as a standalone piece it is wilfully unlistenable.
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Three Imaginary Girls
The Meeting of the Waters and Tangerine Dream records were heavy on atmosphere. They’re products of time and place, in collaboration with outside members. All of this output seems to point toward a reinvigorated Animal Collective that’s experimenting with form and content and building towards a new sound.
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Clash Magazine
A transfixing, beguiling dip into aquatic realms.
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Under the Radar Mag
In effect, one hopes that Tangerine Reef would truly, if only for a moment, embrace its beauty in a straightforward, naked way, but this has never been one of Animal Collective's goals or concerns. It doesn't quite get there, though when much of the noise drops away, leaving only a couple of pure notes, "Best of Times (Worst of All)" comes awfully close.
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Brooklyn Vegan
The marine theme doesn’t just apply to the lyrics and the visuals; the whole album is so wet with reverb that it literally sounds like it was recorded underwater. And all the various sound effects, both on Avey’s voice and on the instruments, make this a very trippy listen.
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Independent
Strip away the warped vocals and heavy reverb to reveal occasional glimmers of beauty and unnerving dissonance, and it could be a film soundtrack – part horror, part nature documentary. But the most beautiful thing about this is by far the luminous fluorescence of the swaying coral creatures of the accompanying film.
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FLOOD Magazine
Too much of Tangerine Reef feels like ambient murk in service of nothing.
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A.V. Club Music
It’s hard to imagine anyone diving into Tangerine Reef more than once, but its twitching tendrils and abstractly erotic imagery are a smart embodiment to the cutesy/creepy Animal Collective aesthetic, a sensibility that’s always existed at the intersection of the Muppets, Mummenschanz, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg.
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Xpress Magazine
Tangerine Reef was created with good intentions to call attention to the plight of reefs and with a healthy experimental approach that Animal Collective is not shy of, for which they should be commended. Listening to the album does succeed in channelling the experience of a dive on a reef somewhat, but overall the excursion will likely leave one exhausted and drained.
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Broadway World
Tangerine Reef is the sight and sound of a literal underwater collective of animals.
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Radio13
The juxtaposition of vivid video art and spectral sound makes for the perfect juxtaposition of life and death. From the slow glimmer of opening track Hair Cutter to the sci-fi futurism of Coral Understanding, the harmonious ebb and flow between art and music creates an immersive experience that is quite unlike anything Animal Collective has ever done. Without it, it is a perfect album to meditate on or have in the background on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
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The Collegian
So many critics seem to see music as the logical result of a creative mind, rather than the sweated-and-bled over child of months and months of directed and aimed pursuit at creation. Music doesn’t happen; it’s made. Behind it are humans, all with goals and functions and personalities in the wake of their past work. Remember these humans.
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Relix
Tangerine Reef also makes good on the band’s oft-touted love for the Grateful Dead. With Avey Tare coming off his recent turn singing Robert Hunter lyrics with Mickey Hart on RAMU , Tangerine Reef is the future on the far side of the Grateful Dead’s MIDI-rich, 1990s drums-and-space segments, the last development in the Dead’s own career of improvisation, taken a few steps further.
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Vinyl Review
Sonically, Tangerine Reef features good separation of instruments and expansiveness, but remains a bit shrill. It could really use some mid-band richness. Most disappointing, the two LPs and their prettily designed inner sleeves are shoved into a thin, unimpressive single jacket.
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Vulture
The band has stated that the project bears the intention of drawing greater awareness to coral reef conservation — a noble cause that nonetheless fails to mask the fact that Tangerine Reef is Animal Collective’s most tossed-off and ephemeral album, purely by design.
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Colorado Springs Independent
In the able hands of composer Avey Tare, it never gets preachy or pedantic, though maybe a bit droney at times.
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Merry Go Round Magazine
Ultimately, TANGERINE REEF is a fascinating and wholesome record by an iconic group of musicians that never becomes enjoyable. Though it is not even close to the weirdest Animal Collective record (DANSE MANATEE takes the cake), it is the most experimental Animal Collective record since they displayed their prowess as a trippy pop act in 2007. Unfortunately, TANGERINE REEF isn’t a hit, but it’s commendable to see Animal Collective try and make a concept album about fish and coral without a key member.
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