Pretty Ghost Girl

After the monumental triumph and subsequent mainstream success of Animal Collective's eighth studio album Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009, the group should have been living the high life. So why, when  his solo album came out just one year later, did David Portner seem so bummed out? In an interview with Pitchfork last summer, Portner, known by his stage name Avey Tare (phonetically pronounced "A-V Tear"), acknowledged, "In the past two years, I've had a darker time." Coping with the news that his sister had recently developed cancer while he simultaneously was attempting to make sense of his recent divorce and his group's newfound fame, Avey Tare's songwriting and musical style is admittedly more morbid and morose than usual on his aptly titled solo project, Down There.

Though maybe not up to the Animal Collective-standard in terms of infectious beats and creative hooks, Tare manages to convey his confused state of being throughout the album and, in the moments when he allows for instances of hope and optimism to surface, his music becomes painstakingly heartbreaking. It is Tare's unique ability to blur the lines between beauty and ugliness that makes his track Ghost of Books my new favorite song.

Keeping in line with the album's concept of being Down There, "Ghost of Books" begins with escalating gooey throbs playing over nauseating gurgling noises as Tare invites us further and further down into the bleak depths of his nightmarishly murky sonic cave. Tare's repetition of the nonsensical line "Keeping myself in my mind" only increases our dread of what awaits us when we reach the bottom. For those of you who are unacquainted with Animal Collective's style, the general rule of thumb when it comes to their music is that the group cares less about comprehensible lyrics and more about using vocals as part of their music's instrumentation.  Using his beloved musical round format, Tare begins to tell a tale of ghostly love. It's all very macabre, strange, and downright esoteric. Yet, at the 1:37 mark, everything changes. Tare's voice emerges from its murky hollows as he joyfully sings over a pulsating bass, "I went away to a ghost land/ It felt like a perfect dream/ I grabbed ahold of two ghost hands/ In a voice that I'll always be."

Surely, this isn't your conventional acoustic guitar-strumming, saxophone-blaring love tune but Tare manages to bring a sincerity to his song that is curiously missing in other musical professions of love. Tare felt like shit at the time he recorded this record and he was not afraid of letting his listeners know it. There is no knight in shining armor idealism to be found here. No banana pancakes to be made. Instead, he comes across as vulnerable, damaged, and disillusioned. It is for this reason that, when "Ghost of Books" draws to its bittersweet conclusion, we sincerely wish Avey Tare all the best as he starts, hand-in-hand with his ghost girl, back down into the cavernous depths of his mind.