There’ll come a day, and that day is practically here, when to make art, you’ll need to drive over to the Head Office and ask for a permit. You’ll be told what kind of art you can make or if you’re prohibited from making it all. And you won’t have to travel all the way to North Korea either.
However, if previous wars of cultural repression, such as those experienced by European artists stuck under the Iron Curtain, were about politics, the new wars would be about character, personality, and quirkiness. You won’t have any, and you’ll be perfectly happy. In fact, judging by the pop world that music labels have shepherded, we’re already living in those nightmarish times.
The book is not yet slammed shut. Eccentrics are not yet outlawed, and this is precisely why The Animal Objective feel it is their duty to jump out from under the curtains and yell “Boo!” You may enjoy their debut EP, “Creature Law,” or you may hate it, but it’s unlikely that you won’t be entertained.
This is rock music made in a harlequin outfit in a world of gray uniforms. But it’s not just weirdness that The Animal Objective is peddling. They can play! The EP’s opener, “Milky Sand and Soil,” sounds like members of Primus and Ween getting together to cover the J-Pop soundtrack of some bizarre anime.
As entertaining as the group may be, The Animal Objective isn’t demanding your approval. “And Dine Ophelie” gives you the full measure of the group’s objectives and their strategies for it. The lyrics seem to describe some kind of doomed love affair, but trying to find a clear meaning is as easy as analyzing a Tristan Tzara poem. The song flows through smoothly played, relaxing musical patterns before, without warning, it fights for dear life to get out of them.
Sailing doesn’t get any smoother from here onward, but these musicians are as much practical jokers as they are jazz ensemble refugees. “Poison Silver Xanadu” begins like a dentist’s surgical steel drill, carries on like an aborted Dream Theater piece about clouds, but offers some kind of relief when, despite all the spinning, it lands safely.
There’s more well-orchestrated weirdness on the final two tracks. But what also remains consistent throughout are the lead vocals. The tone is bright, clean, controlled, and always able to hang above the busy instrumental sections. That’s true even on songs like “Sublime,” which sounds like the music of some evil fairground attraction being moved across Southern U.S. states, or the undanceable funk of “Irregular Handshake,” the closest that the EP gets to a single that wouldn’t automatically discourage mass consumption.
Where does it all leave us? Hopefully, wanting to experience more of the world. If this kind of proficient-played oddity could have been painstakingly stitched together and now exists inside of your Spotify app, who knows what else is out there? You won’t find out by flipping through the charts or scrolling through your social media. There’s a world beyond the gray asylum of pop culture. The Animal Objective is living free and embracing as much weirdness as its members want.
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