Tickley Feather

Label: Paw Tracks

If you were worried that people had stopped doing drugs and locking themselves in closets making insane music, please rest easy. Where exactly the Paw Tracks street team (a.k.a. Animal Collective) dug up Tickley Feather is a mystery, and even less is known about the origins of these strange sounds. The best anyone can guess is that it’s one woman Annie Sachs, aided here by Rusty Santos, offering up a debut culled from four years of four-track home recordings. The album is surprisingly cohesive, full of seconds-long interludes and casio-beat ramblings of muted musical sounds from unknown sources and Sachs’ Bjork-on-a-bummer-trip voice. Kind of like Ariel Pink’s jealous kid sister, working on her own jams under cover of the night and unleashing them on us in a merciless instant. An adventurous, naked and thoroughly weird listen that gives us hope for the endless future of home recording.