Relearn This Album, Animal Collective Brings Feels to Queens

Flushing Avenue in Maspeth is warehouses and truck traffic by day. Next week, two nights running, it becomes the only place in New York to hear a record most fans assumed would never be played live.

On Wednesday, October 21, and Thursday, October 22, Animal Collective plays Feels, its 2005 album, from start to finish at the Knockdown Center in Queens. The Thursday show came first. The Wednesday was added after it sold out.

Stereogum reports that these are the first shows with all four members since the Time Skiffs tour, almost four years ago. The only other dates are in California, at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on October 24 and the Fox Theater in Pomona on October 26.

A Question Nobody Asked

The idea came from the audience. When the band reissued Feels for its 20th anniversary last year, fans kept asking the same thing. Why not play it live?

"It was a good question, and honestly, one we just hadn't asked ourselves," the band says in a statement quoted by The Fader. Schedules had rarely lined up. Then they decided to try. "We can relearn this album," they said.

That is a candid thing for a band to say about its best-loved record. Feels is dense. It hides its songs under layers of sound, and getting four people to rebuild that live, two decades later, is real work.

"There's a pop song in every one of those tracks." Scott Colburn, the album's producer, in a 2005 Fader cover story

Colburn's point, as The Fader recalls it, was that the experimental fog sits around conventional songs. The band's job next week is to find them again in a room, at volume.

Twenty-One Candles

The Fader places the album at the moment of the group's rise, a Brooklyn band by way of Baltimore, to the front of indie rock's experimental wing. Stereogum notes that the band marked the 20th anniversary with a deluxe reissue and a live album released on MiniDisc.

The band is calling these shows "a 21st birthday party" for the record. It is a looser idea than an anniversary tour. They will play Feels in full and add some extras from the same period, Stereogum reports, without saying which.

Bots at the Door

The first two dates sold out fast, and not cleanly. Stereogum's follow-up reports that ticket bots and other glitches shut many fans out, including some who had signed up for the presale. The band said it had not expected bots to become a problem, and added New York and Pomona dates in response.

"It is infuriating to us that there is nothing anyone can do to stop that or to set a limit on the retail price," the band wrote, in a message Stereogum quoted. Stereogum predicted the added shows would sell out quickly too.

The band also admitted the obvious. Two shows in the two biggest American cities leave most fans with no way in. The window is narrow by design. "We only have a short window to get together right now," the band wrote in the statement The Fader published. On what comes after, they say only that they will see how it goes.

That makes next week less a comeback than a reunion with an end date. Four musicians whose schedules rarely line up are meeting in one room to relearn a record, play it twice for New York and twice for California, and then scatter again.

What to Know Before You Go

The Knockdown Center is at 52-19 Flushing Avenue in Maspeth. For the October 22 show, a listing on mxdwn gives doors at 7 p.m. and the show at 8 p.m., ages 18 and up, with tickets sold through Dice. The original sale opened in September.

Neither night has been reported as having tickets left at face value. The Thursday show sold out, and the Wednesday date was added for the fans who missed it. Check Dice and the venue before you make the trip, and be wary of resale.

The former glass factory has become a regular stop for big indie nights. It is also where LCD Soundsystem opens its fall run in Queens and Brooklyn in November.

Feels asks a listener to sit inside the noise and wait for the song to surface. Next week, in Maspeth, the band has to do the same thing.