Animal Collective are a fascinating fresh breath of experimental indie folk rock air, that will be perceived a lot of different ways by every pair of ears that Sung Tongs fall within. Using layers of vocals, acoustic guitar, organic percussion and a few spoken word loop mutations (ala Revolution #9) these four players (none of them immodest enough to use real names) weave a sort of strange magic that is actually more accessible (if this word can be applied to this music) than their critically adored previous Here Comes the Indian.

By using repetitions and themes that sally forth from them, Sung Tongs hits the listener at a primal level, it gets into your guts like it was preceded by a tab of blotter that was a little stronger than you were expecting. The first track "Leaf House" is the biggest head fake as it is produced and performed in a manner that you could pass off as a Cocteau Twins track from nearly any stage of their career. The third track "The Softest Voice" features gentle fingerpicked guitar that could pass for a song off the first Genesis album, when it was Anthony Phillips playing guitar before stage fright necessitated he be replaced by Steve Hackett.

The balance of the songs, however are far less easy to compare with such obscure and dated references. Though the mini-track "College" is clearly a tip of the bong to Brian Wilson, most of Sung Tongs sounds like music John Lennon might have made during his famous year-long lost weekend that he spent in California with Harry Nilsson. Just a bunch of drunken drugged out genius tossed-off as a lark for no other reason than to vent during his great period of non-productivity.

Much of this wildly free and unstructured wonder sounds at times like a record being played backwards. You'll hear traces of David Byrne, and Robyn Hitchcock in the brew. But the most apt description of this carnival of surreal beauty would be a scenario whereby an alien race managed to get ahold of a time-capsuled Beatles anthology and attempted to get it to play on their mostly incompatible stereo devices.