Collective: Beauty and the Bleeps

BALTIMORE -- A cappella will never be hip. But if any group could make it happen, it would be Animal Collective. The white-hot indie trio, whose album "Merriweather Post Pavilion" is a lock to finish near the top of countless year-end best-of lists, incorporates all sorts of blippy, bleepy, droney and woozy sounds into its psychedelic-electronic concoctions.

But it's the vocal gymnastics of Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) -- chants, chirps, coos and even some actual words -- that serve as the centerpieces to their songs. At the band's U.S. tour opener Sunday night at the tiny, sold-out Ottobar (the band also played a sold-out show at the 9:30 club last night), those voices were at their mesmerizing best. When the pair sang in tandem, the effect was as hypnotic as the optical-illusion backdrop that hung behind them.

For all of the musical madness that goes on in Animal Collective's extended jams -- much of it masterminded by the band's non-singing member, knob-twiddling, miner-flashlight-wearing Geologist (Brian Weitz) -- Avey Tare and Panda Bear sing these songs as if they were nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes that would make any infant break into a hysterical fit of crying, but nursery rhymes nonetheless. "Who Could Win a Rabbit" was a gleeful campfire celebration, voices excitedly ascending and descending with every syllable. The effect was more soothing on the irresistible set-closer, "My Girls," which was the aural equivalent of call-and-response with fun-house mirrors.

As the band stretched 13 songs over nearly two hours at this hometown show, a new micro-genre seemed to emerge: vocal jam band.

The stage was filled with samplers, keyboards, a couple of guitars, a handful of drums and more wires than you'd find at Radio Shack, but all of the noises they generated proved to be mere background sounds for Avey Tare and Panda Bear's vocals. At times, they ambled on for minutes, seemingly entranced by their own siren songs, of which the only negative consequences were some hippie-ish twirling by underage kids. When the music stopped and Panda Bear sang unaccompanied at the end of "Daily Routine," it was among the evening's most memorable moments.

What the pair sang about wasn't nearly as important as how they sang it. Only a handful of lyrics were decipherable and, frankly, that's probably for the best. For most bands, the standard singalong is a fist-pumping, declarative chorus. Not so with Animal Collective. It's more like the intro to "Fireworks," which found many in the audience joining Avey Tare in his high-pitched "doo doo-doo doo-doo!" shrieks.

Some gooey sentiments can cause eye rolls when read on paper, such as: "I don't need to seem like I care about material things like a social status/I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls." But when Panda Bear repeatedly chanted those lines as if they were a mantra -- with a two-hand grip on the microphone, eyes clenched shut-- only the most stubborn of souls could resist.