Immediately after recording the last Animal Collective album, »Time Skiffs«, Dave Portner started working on his fourth solo work under the name of Avey Tare. To record »7s«, he retreated to his small home studio in North Carolina in the spring of 2020, partially due to the pandemic of course, with the resulting music on the precisely seven new tracks sounding correspondingly intimate and homely. While Avey Tare was still wading knee-deep in dub on his last solo album, »Cows On Hourglass Pond«, and sometimes even sounded accessible, at times even poppy with his slasher flicks, »7s« is a much more thoughtful affair. Instead of a madcap hit like »Little Fang«, the two almost ten-minute central pieces »Hey Bog« and »Sweeper’s Grin« draw a deep breath, gently take the listener by the hand and carry him off into the loneliness of mystified nature, childhood memories or his own unsorted world of thoughts. »Invisible Darlings«, by contrast, with its gentle piano movements and uplifting lyrics (»You can beat the thing that eats you… This bad world does need you«) exudes a fractured but earnest optimism. With musical cues coming from all sides – here a little samba, there an African-style guitar, and then some mariachi brass on »Neurons« – Avey Tare nevertheless remains constantly anchored in that vast, almost unfathomable cosmos of sound that he has been formulating with Animal Collective for over two decades.
7s
