Strangely, Animal Collective seemed to take a mild critical poke for "Strawberry Jam" last year, perhaps due in part to the extravagant blog love for the Panda Bear solo album, "Person Pitch", which preceded it by a few months. For my own part, I couldn't quite see why there was a bit of a backlash against this generally marvellous band. Maybe it was because their nagging kindergarten melodies were given a greater prominence on "Strawberry Jam" - though to be honest, it's still an idea of pop music that's been mediated by the avant-garde. Or maybe it was because after a glut of releases over the past few years, the creepy, exuberant, yelping Animal Collective aesthetic might just have started getting on the nerves of some of their longer-serving fans. I can understand this; in many ways, AC are cursed by the relative originality of their sound. Once you've got used to that jittery, high-pitched atmosphere, to those yabbering harmonies and sloshing textures, I imagine some listeners will want Avey Tare, Panda Bear and so on to try and find a new gimmick. The thing is, I don't think this is a gimmick - it's just how they make music. And consequently, however their music evolves, their pronounced difference to other bands will make their records sound the same as each other. Does that make sense? Not sure, but my point is that I'm pleased to say that "Water Curses", the new Animal Collective EP, is more of the same, more or less. "Water Curses" itself is one of those hysterical, hyperactive AC songs that continues to tumble over itself in trying to express some random, breathless manifestation of the human spirit etc. It could have fitted in quite comfortably on "Strawberry Jam", if you're still not 100 per cent behind that record. The other three tracks, however, drift away into more spectral, even more satisfying terrain. "Street Flash", "Cobwebs" and "Seal Eyeing" - three titles that could've been concocted by an Animal Collective random name generator, for sure - have that kind of dislocated ambience that came to prominence on my favourite AC album, "Feels". These are gentle but disorienting tracks; ebbing, spacious lullabies where the band's more abrasive edges gradually dissolve into muted squelch and squiggle. Still, though, unnerving elements remain deep in the mix, so that "Street Flash"'s reverie is punctuated by distant forlorn laughs and some great primitive roars. There's something enchanted but also unanchored about Animal Collective at their best, and the hazy imprecision that they conjure up, the magical originality of their music, make them hard to write about. Here's my last stab at articulating why I think they're such a great band, circa "Strawberry Jam".

After the sad news of Charlton Heston's death yesterday morning, I had hoped that the rest of my Sunday would pan out in a more genteel manner -- The Archers omnibus, a mooch round Borders, maybe a pint, that kind of thing. That was until an email from our web queen, Farah, pinged into my inbox. The email contained a link to a Youtube page. Clicking on the link, up came these words: Lost In Translation (Bill Murray's WHISPER revealed) I must admit to having found myself, in the odd quiet moment, wondering exactly what it is that Bill Murray does indeed whisper into Scarlett Johansson's ear in the final moments of Lost In Translation, just before the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" kicks in. I wouldn't say I've exactly been kept awake at night thinking about this, but I have, at least once, and admittedly slightly drunkenly, skipped through the DVD, put the sound up full, and tried to discern, through the hubub of Tokyo street noises, what The Whisper is. I think I've even watched the film with the Subtitles option on, and been slightly disappointed when all that happens is that the words "He whispers something into her ear" flash up on screen. I've occasionally mulled and mused and generally pontificated over The Whisper, but that's been fine. It's like, say the end of Cache, or No Country For Old Men, when Things are Left Open. It's sort of satisfying, it suggests you're an adult and you can deal with these loose ends and bewitching digressions -- hey, that's Life, right? I don't need everything spelt out for in black and white -- after all, I can tie my own shoe laces. And now, apparently, someone claims to have digitally buggered around with the soundtrack and revealed The Whisper. With slightly shaky fingers, I clicked on the link and watched as Tokyo flickered to life... Then hit the pause. No -- wait -- what the Dickens was I thinking? Did I really want to know what Bill says to ScarJo? Would my enjoyment of the film be better off by maintaining this current state of ignorance? And can you imagine if, prompted by a glass or two of sherry, I, delirious with the joy of knowledge, took it upon myself to announce to my friends, family or work colleagues -- "Gather round, for this, this is what Bill whispers in Scarlett's ear!" I could, conceivably, look like a fool. So, anyway, I walked away from the computer. I went off and did something else. I shuffled some shoes around in the hallway. I looked out of the window at the remnants of the snow melting off the daffodils in my garden. I watched a squirrel snuffling around in a flower bed. I whistled a tune. But the computer was still there, nagging away at me, I could almost hear a spectral voice whispering "Click play... Click play..." So I emailed the Youtube link to my friend Bumble, Sofia Coppola's former publicist, who's always maintained The Whisper wasn't scripted and she has no idea what The Whisper was. She emailed me back -- "Oh that's so brilliantly enigmatic!" which, in itself, seems to open another can of worms. You see, what if it's a lie? What if I click on the Play button, learn what The Whisper is, and then find out later it's a work of fiction, concocted by some smart arsed yoot in Boyse, Idaho who's merrily going around shattering the dreams of men like myself, who while not exactly obsessed about The Whisper, have, as I've said, drunkenly fumbled around with a DVD and a volume control once or twice (twice, alright? I did it twice). So, that's something else to worry about. If I learn what I believe is The Whisper, then I've crossed a line, I'm privy to a secret the film makers never intended to be out there in the public doman; if I then learn The Whisper is A Lie, I'm back at square one, but still soiled by the knowledge that I've transgressed. Oh, is it worth it? Anyway, now, today, at around 11.25 am, I finally gave in and watched it. Bumble was right -- if it's true, it is brilliantly enigmatic. And it didn't ruin the film for me. Though I am prepared for someone to email me confirming it's a fake. In the meantime, the link is here -- if you want to know (possibly) the truth about The Whisper and can, of course, live with your conscience.

A couple of weeks ago, I was writing here about the excellent new No Age album, and about indie orthodoxy masquerading as somehow adventurous in the world of shoegazing. Without going over the whole argument again, I think the gist was that early ‘90s shoegazing - which mainly sounds so bland now - acted as a gateway for me into a whole world of ambient, avant-garde music. I was reminded of this last week by two things. One, the arrival of an album by a band called Sennen, which I must admit I haven’t heard, but the premise of someone naming themselves after a Ride song fills me, in 2008, with very little excitement. Two, the arrival of “Sand” by Philip Jeck, which is precisely the sort of expansive, challenging, ultimately aesthetically satisfying record that shoegazing inadvertently lead me to. I have a few Jeck records, most recently his collaboration with the great Gavin Bryars on a new version of the latter’s “Sinking Of The Titanic” (LTM are releasing some Bryars work from the early ‘80s, incidentally, including some beautiful piano studies). Jeck is one of those avant-gardists who loiters awkwardly between the roles of musician and sound artist, seeing as he builds his music out of old records and record players. He isn’t the first person to fetishise balls of fluff on old gramophone needles, of course: Portishead made a fortune out of distorting old hip hop breaks on their first album, after all. But for Jeck, the surface is the depth, so that “Sand” is a disorienting patchwork of static, churn and drift, out of which faint melodies – a familiar but unnameable orchestral vamp in the middle of “Chime Again”, for instance – sometimes emerge. It’s hard to write about this sort of music without making it sound a bit forbidding, but – to use that shoegazing analogy – imagine the gauzy textures of My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When” reconstructed using radically different instruments, and moved even further away from the idea of a conventional tune. The results are immersive and pretty revitalising, first thing on a Monday morning. I guess Jeck’s nearest reference point, even though he uses guitars rather than customised record players, would be his labelmate Christian Fennesz. Fennesz has a similarly voluptuous approach to noise, a taste for soiled ambience, and a gift for creating illusions of memory through his music. Jeck’s aged crackle, and the hints of half-unremembered tunes buried beneath it, create a kind of nostalgia for . . . what, exactly? Something nebulous, evanescent, a bit pretentious. Maybe for the days when, briefly, Slowdive sounded radical to me. . .