Animal Collective To Reissue Campfire Songs

Animal Collective, perhaps the most blogged-about indie band ever, have announced the reissue of Campfire Songs, their pastoral, five-song album, which was first released in 2003, before the world went Animal Collective crazy. It will be released on Paw Tracks Records on January 26.

The CD, first released by the tiny label Catsup Plate and now out of print, was originally dreamed up by bandmates Dave Portner (Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) during their college days. According to the band, it’s not meant to be evocative of songs sung around the campfire with s’mores and a six pack, but rather, songs that were spawned from the fire itself. “We wanted to give the music the feeling and atmosphere of the outdoors and the warmth of a fire, so people could bring it indoors.”

According to the press release:

While the songs were completed in the apartment that three of the members shared (Geologist does not play on this album) they chose to record the music on a screened-in porch in Maryland using portable mini disc players so as to allow the ambience of trees blowing in the wind, the birds chirping and the insects in the area to become an integral part of the sound flow. What remains intact are the melodies that have always been a part of the AC sound-though here they have been stripped away of any electronic accompaniment and stretched and slowed to a calmer place than anywhere AC had been before and perhaps has gone since.

Here’s the track list for Campfire Songs:

1. Queen In My Pictures
2. Doggy
3. Two Corvettes
4. Moo Rah Rah Rain
5. De Soto De Son