Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is the phrase that Brian Weitz, the man behind the moniker ‘Geologist’ and one of the members of Animal Collective, repeated daily for over four thousand days. Now it’s been over five thousand days since he stopped.
In the opening of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice there is a discussion on the impact of rituals, even the smallest ones, how over time they create something bigger, like a river eroding away at a stone or sediment layering into geological strata. Repetition shapes reality. Any singular thing done every day will change something. Even small things contribute to big things; small things like a single cigarette every few hours (or the lack of one) or hours spent in the recording studio creating something. In an interview, Brian Weitz described his creative process simply, “I hit record until I start thinking of something else.” Some hours of discipline later, and you have an album.
The titular question is, in its presence and absence, the sun and moon of his days, orbiting the experiences that inspired the album. Like a lingering dream that colours the day, Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is a phrase that drapes like a firmament over the entirety of the record; inescapable and indelible, a stain you can’t rub away.
The first track, ‘Oracle Road’, opens with a shifting hurdy gurdy, as if tuning between stations before settling and blooming into a drastic expanse. Like the unveiling of a curtain to the stars in a woodcut by Flammarion, what it reveals is grand and sparkling. The initial sounds are undergirded by percussion and bass that accumulate into something like a summer storm or distant thunder, before the beat drops and the sky opens. The rest of the track unfolds like a carpet, carrying us away, bobbing and spinning in suspended space. Mythical and shining, the most intricate moments of the track and album as a whole evoke a bustling primordial ocean, teeming with ancient life and elemental energy.
‘Tonic’ opens with a hurried beat overlaying a suspended gong, punctuated by unsettling creaks and riffs that chuckle like gears winding towards their zenith. With tickling bass and the tones of an electric guitar like an alarm ringtone from an early 2000s movie, the title of the song suggests something peaceful and restorative, unlike the uneasy experience it delivers. While not unpleasant, it is anything but peaceful, but the tension feels intentional. Maybe there is healing to be done in the disruption. Perhaps the chaos can be mollifying.
Immediately shifting gears from the primordial to the cosmic, ‘RV Envy’ jump-starts with a catching beat, a ubiquitous hallmark of Animal Collective’s sound. You might expect that pulling one part away from the whole would leave you with something solitary, but Weitz’s departure from his proverbial and literal ‘collective’ does not reduce him to a singularity. Instead, he emerges as a complex sum of parts all of his own, like gazing down a microscope and watching matter collapse into infinity. Proto-industrial in nature, ‘RV Envy’ is equally funky and post-punk, full of scratches, jolts, and restlessness. Refusing to settle into a fixed form, the track distorts into a morphing tesseract, shrinking and inhaling between verses.
‘Compact Mirror Last Names’ is the real tonic of the album. Like a slow drizzle or the unhurried spin of a planet on its axis, Weitz offers a tasty, gentle, arterial bassline that takes us by the hand into the expanse we glimpsed in the first track. Like rummaging around in an un-empty pocket on an empty expanse, everything echoes. Strikingly neutral and patient, the bells ring out, drawing attention to the vastness. As with any art, the emptiness is just as meaningful as what occupies it. Like complementary colours, the silence into which the music dissolves holds its own weight. Halfway through, a suspension of sound breaks the groove like a deep breath before the crackling distortion withers you away into the next track. The scratchiness of its closing feels like excavation, like the art of archaeology is not just in what is unearthed from the depths, but the act of unearthing itself.
True to the name, Geologist constructs tracks like layers of sediment, accumulated over time through processes of upheaval, exposure and routine. The music carries the vastness of a desert with archaic formations and sparse flora dotting the expanse. It fuses elements of krautrock and prog jazz, incorporating drone and chanter strings on a hurdy-gurdy into sounds that are both electronic and traditional. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? begins in the celestial firmament, gazing skyward like Flammarion’s traveler peering beyond the veil, and by the end brings us back to the filament, into the Earth, grounding us once again.
