Finding order in the surreal - Animal Collective, gig review

Animal Collective Troxy

Brian Weitz, aka Geologist, of Animal Collective on stage at the Troxy (Getty)

Animal Collective deliver a sensory overload tonight with songs that are so complexly layered and textured that at times, we find ourselves wondering if it's even working.

On their tenth full length album, Painting With, the experimental pop band from Baltimore prove reactionary against previous records. Yes, there's still the vocal interplay of Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), backed by unconventional structures and Geologist's (Brian Weitz) whirring synths that ally beats into a euphoric wall of noise against drummer Jeremy Hyman's unshakeable rhythms.

Having experimented with various sounds (saccharine-pop, industrial, minimalist repetition and exuberant electro), the band reached their avant-pop pinnacle on 2009's dizzying landmark album Merriweather Post Pavilion. Four years on from Centipede Hz and Animal Collective have turned their hand to more distilled, three-minute pop songs in a sweet, compact form.

Painting With is hardly as slimmed-down as it seems on record though; tonight it is brittle yet jarring and progressive with each band member striving for a slow-building sensory overload and challenging the crowd to brave the surging clatters to find the heart of the song.

Their set, comprised mostly of new songs, hops from pumping Beach Boys surf-rock to psychedelic wobbles and triple-time beats. "Hounds of Bairro" hints at West African beats with most songs emerging out of, and dissolving back into, rhythm and noise. Stray splutters from keyboards and synths settle into each beat with poplike verses and precise vocals emerging from Lennox and Portner.

Peering out from the stage are cartoonish monoliths: their surreal and astonished expressions bathed in a psychedelic light that welcomes us into the band's world of leaner sound frames and abstract lyrical preoccupations.

When Animal Collective work together, it replicates the stage design - finding order in the surreal, but when they veer off (out of sync synths or the bass drowning out the drums) we lose the thread of what they're trying to achieve. There lies the fun to watch them steer back on track.

On "FloriDada" the American state is celebrated as a "mystical place" to a poppy stomp while potential hit "Golden Gal" is a jaunty, disorientating number that calls for gender equality.

"Hocus Pocus" woozily slips along in drone effects courtesy of ex-Velvet Underground guitarist John Cale, before surging into a mind-bending rush.

Painting With might seem relatively simple amid Animal Collective’s back catalogue, but when the band's testing distortions and eccentricities gain momentum, it is euphoric.