Can you decipher the visual album by Animal Collective ODDSAC?

The idea of a “visual album” is certainly not new: one could argue that the cinematic versions of Tommy and The Wall or Super Furry Animals’ project to release videos for all the songs on Rings Around the World would qualify. But Animal Collective’s ODDSAC, which took four years to create with director Danny Perez and was released in July, is a more uncompromising attempt to create a piece of music and a film where each only makes sense when accompanied by the other – sounds enhance the image, and images reflect the mood and timbre of the sounds.

It’s an intriguing concept that, on first viewing at last week’s preview screening, was reminiscent of a DV vampire movie made by David Lynch (if he was into experimental hypnotronica), creating a confrontational and immersive experience. Although not one you’d want to repeat on hallucinogens. Even though that seems to be the point.

It’s undoubtedly “art”, but how do you make sense of such a mind-blowing work full of vampire monks, demonic fakirs, and prolonged episodes of trance-inducing loops? Let’s go through it in full and give it a try. Warning: contains spoilers. Although I don’t know what they spoil.

Scene/Song One: Opening shots of fire and pasture give way to a night shot of distant flame jugglers accompanied by a red turbaned fakir covering his eyes. Meanwhile, a blonde girl pulls at peeling wallpaper in a tattered room, releasing streams of oil from underneath. The music is distorted afrobeat electronica over which distorted vocals sing: “Grandma used to like the way you played.”

Scene/Song Two: As the music builds into an intense, pounding pulse, we enter a piece of hypnotic, repetitive visuals of oil and rotating flames, and it feels like being slapped in the face with a copy of the Some Friendly Charlatans album cover for five minutes. . From time to time, a “drumbeat” of screaming Lemmies or oil-covered heads erupts from the screen.

Scene/Song Three: Bizarre monks with paint peeling off their faces, babbling inaudible exorcists, talking to the camera like a nightmare version of the Mighty Bush’s council of mystics. Elsewhere, a boisterous Neanderthal washes white balls in a river to an abstract electronic instrument. Unexpectedly scary shots of freak monks suggest that the Ring producers may have had a hand in all of this.

Scene/Song Four: One monk rows a boat across a foggy lake at night to the first recognizable “song” on the album; a Beach Boys Meets-Fleet Foxes folk number that seems to have been fed through Autotune, set to “random”. It’s eerie and quite wonderful.

Scene/Song Five: A corridor of light reminiscent of the climax of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey”, leads us into a graphic loop that looks like an iTunes Visualizer reprogrammed by a psychopath. The audio is an unsettling cacophony of submarine radar flashes, bells, Bedlam babbling, and electronic catfights. One suspects that Derren Brown is involved in all of this.

Sixth scene/song: pebble beach, daytime. A white-haired skateboarding creature begins to assemble a drum kit on the rocks to a pastoral arpeggio and the sound of a lapping creek. A false sense of security is suspected. And indeed, as the monster skater breaks his first skin, deafening demonic hell drums are heard, accompanied by inserts to Lemmy’s scream from the second scene/song, which turns out to be a medieval warrior swinging a rock on a rope. The song itself is somewhere between Neutral Milk Hotel and They Might Be Giants, and features the sound of the Kraken belching and the lyrics “Never try the simple thing”. That’s pretty much it.

Scene/song seven: Plot. A paddleboarding monk reveals his vampire fangs as he chases a family through the woods. As a mother washes laundry in a stream and roasts marshmallows with her husband and children at their campsite, a breathy vocal hisses “put your arms around me” to the tune of a police siren. The family thinks the marshmallows are too hot and starts spewing huge streams of molten sugar out of their mouths, just as a vampire monk attacks one of their children and goes wild to the sound of crazy techno. Then the sun rises and the vampire flees, leaking out of his head and eventually dissolving in eruptions of blue paint from his skull.

Scene/Song Eight: The blind fakir from the first scene/song is now in the tidbits room, watching a cooking lesson with a blonde girl and her three friends. The girls make baby noises, and the fakir roars incomprehensible instructions at them like an even more satanic Gordon Ramsay. They begin a hilarious food fight to one of Animal Collective’s most catchy pop tunes, but not until the camera pulls back to see one last twist: the room is actually in the meadows! Eat your heart out, M Night Shyamalan! The song fades out with the line “what happened?”