The release of Fall Be Kind, a five-song EP of MPP leftovers, shows that the band’s scraps are as good as the best of what most other acts can offer.

Listening to Animal Collective – be it Fall Be Kind, Merriweather Post Pavilion, or anything else – rarely evokes other bands, though. These guys practically exist in a vacuum.

After being kicked around live for as long as any of the other tracks on Merriweather, “Graze” was ultimately left off that record, but it now has a home as the opener on Fall Be Kind. Though it lacks the dynamism of the live version – the shift from the vocal rumination to pan flute-driven frenzy is muted by comparison – it would have fit just fine on Merriweather.

“Graze” segues perfectly into “What Would I Want? Sky,” which features a tasteful use of the first ever Grateful Dead sample, an iconic voice overshadowed by Avey Tare’s hazy introspection.

“Bleed” slows things down, repeating the same two stanzas without aim or percussion. “On a Highway” finds Tare being uncharacteristically straightforward in his chronicling of loneliness and neuroses of life on the road.

Fall Be Kind is Animal Collective’s fourth EP and likewise the fourth to follow a proper album. Each time in the past, these EPs have bridged the stylistic gap between records, touchstones in the evolution of an ever-evolving band: Prospect Hummer portended Feels, People portended Strawberry Jam, and Water Curses portended Merriweather Post Pavilion. That is, taken with the EPs, the shifts Animal Collective make from album to album seem more logical.

It’s impossible to predict just where the band goes next, but Fall Be Kind seems to offer a lot of hints, most of all on closer “I Think I Can.” The seven-minute Panda Bear showcase has plenty of what Merriweather does best: jarring rhythms, boiler plate profundity, synthesized goosebumps. But it builds on the brand a bit, perhaps peeking at the future for both the band and all of music, at the very least tightening up what Animal Collective does best. Everyone else has a lot of catching up to do.

Hidden in this aesthetic conformity, though, is Alvin Band’s deceiving austerity. While other bands of this ilk mire themselves in obscure samples, instrumental exploration and otherworldly bleeps and bloops, Alvin Band takes the do-it-yourself to its logical extreme. In addition to self-recording and -producing Mantis Preying, you won’t find a single sound on the record that didn’t come out of Schaier’s body.

The a capella thing has certainly been done before and in more interesting ways than Schaier can offer (see: Bjork or Rundgren, Todd), though as just a kid with ProTools, he does deserve some credit.

The record is never as spartan as such a solo endeavor so often necessitates. Though short on instruments (and time, clocking in at only 23 minutes), Mantis Preying is long on ideas. Schaier piles on all sorts of melodic and percussive vocal gimmickry and gets an awful lot of mileage out of his 21-year-old larynx. At the very least, the album always sounds full.

Schaier borrows a lot from operatic ancestors like Brian Wilson and Freddie Mercury and does so successfully, even if he can’t avoid his forebears’ propensity toward exceptionally banal song conceits, like Hebrew school, playing pool and The Phantom of the Opera.

But lyrics aren’t what make Mantis Preying, and neither is the choral subterfuge. Schaier can only hide his sonic solitude for so long before his tricks lose their novelty. Luckily, the James Mercer-soundalike has a knack for melody that would be evident without all the games and contrivances of Mantis Preying.

Take for example Lady Portrait, Mantis Preying’s even shorter companion, a six-song bedroom recording that features, yes, some vocal overdubs but plenty of conventional instrumentation as well. Guitars and drums, even.

It’s just as catchy.

The key issue with Mantis Preying is that so much aural tomfoolery can largely obfuscate the songwriting that lies beneath it. As a result, the record too often seems like nothing more than a playful dalliance. Still, Mantis Preying offers nothing if not promise from the young songwriter, and even if he never finds a slick producer or, you know, an actual instrument, it’s an engagingly whimsical record that can stand on its own. Which is good, because that’s all there is.

Reviewing this album in 2009 is like trying to prove to someone that water is wet or that fire is hot. Every qualitative bit of this album is fundamental and self-evident by now, because the very lens through which we judge pop albums anymore was made by the same opticians who recorded Abbey Road in the first place. That is, there is no stick with which to measure Abbey Road because Abbey Road is the measuring stick.

But despite all the pontification and preaching, prattling and proselytizing, Abbey Road still somehow sounds fresh.

Yes, the version released this week is a slightly different mix, but in the grand scheme of things, this is a cosmetic change when even noticeable. Everything you hear on this iteration of Abbey Road, you’ve heard a million times, even if you haven’t spun the record a groove-dulling myriad of times. From the melodic balladry of “Something” to the distorted heartache of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” to the blind ambition of that sprawling suite of classics that close the record, elements of Abbey Road can be heard in just about everything that has come since.

This is the record’s lasting achievement: after four decades, after band after band has copped from this record (and gotten stale before the first chorus), Abbey Road still sounds brand new.

On past records, the Mars Volta hasn’t really adhered to this idea, instead opting to forge impenetrably sprawling prog odysseys, limited by neither the tenets of rock music nor the dicta of the English (or any other) language.

Octahedron, however, the band’s latest offering, finds the Mars Volta settling down a bit. After four full-lengths of unrelenting sonic urgency, records that began to pigeonhole the band as a one-trick pony (albeit a pretty neat trick), the band has taken a bit of a breather.

That’s not to say Octahedron phoned in by any means. It’s just a much more subdued Mars Volta than we’re used to. It’s certainly not the “acoustic” album that was once suggested, but it’s a whole lot mellower than past work. In establishing these personal goals for itself, the band not only maintains relevance but reaches an entirely new level of appeal.

The band’s hallmarks are all still there: the average song length is still over six minutes, there are still about a million ridiculous guitar solos, and the lyrics still don’t make a ton of sense. “Cotopaxi” would not have been at all out of place on The Bedlam in Goliath. But as a whole, this is undoubtedly a new direction for the Mars Volta.

Opener “Since We’ve Been Wrong” is a slow burner that takes more than five minutes before the percussion kicks in, and even then, you can tell the band is holding back. The guitar effects on “With Twilight As My Guide,” instead of alienating the listener, transports him somewhere else entirely. “Copernicus” even has an actual piano.

Octahedron clocks in at only 50 minutes, and the songs therein are a whole lot less exhausting than in the past. Where past Volta records could take multiple listens to get through and could leave you a bit burnt out at the end, Octahedron is succinct enough to be consumed in one sitting and digestible enough to not leave any nasty after-effects.

Such a tender approach serves to humanize the band in a way they’ve always fled from, instead choosing to overt obtuseness and obfuscation of the fact that this music is even made by people in the first place. Again, this is a far cry from anything that could be considered “acoustic,” but for the Mars Volta, it’s something. More than anything, the most salient feature of Octahedron is just how hard the band has to work to stay within these boundaries.

Ultimately the boundaries the band set for itself allow Octahedron to be by far the Mars Volta’s most accessible record to date. For a band that has actively fled from accessibility in the past (just take a look at the track listing for Frances the Mute), such a label could be taken as pejorative. Not so for Octahedron: the Mars Volta is still at least a few dozen guitar solos to the west of being a pop act, but the bands newest album is successful if only for its digestibility.

The Fiery Furnaces’ new record isn’t out for another few weeks, but that didn’t stop the Chicago experimental garage rockers from playing the upcoming I’m Going Away in full – albeit a bit out of order – last night at Philadelphia’s Kung Fu Necktie.

From the moment the show was announced for the Fishtown hipster haven, something seemed amiss: why would a band like the Fiery Furnaces play a 120-person capacity bar when it’s accustomed to playing –and filling — venues four and five times the size?

Despite the unorthodox setting and lack of an opener, the Furnaces’ set started off innocently enough with a rendition of “Here Comes the Summer,” sans the electronic flourishes jettisoned by Matt Friedberger’s decision to play guitar all night.

As a result, the entire set was a whole lot more straightforward than we’ve come to expect from the Fiery Furnaces, but in sacrificing a bit of the band’s more radical tendencies, the resultant performance was a little noisier and a whole lot more boisterous than usual.

After a couple more Furnaces classics, the band got down to business: all twelve tracks from the as-yet-unreleased I’m Going Away, due out July 21st. It was the first time any of the songs had been played in public, but they were pretty damn tight for an inaugural performance.

As mentioned, the band went with a standard guitar-drums-bass lineup for the show, so missing was the new record’s ubiquitous piano, although if nothing else, the guitar adaptations rocked a little harder.

Finally, after churning through all the new material – well received, by the way, for a 45-minute stretch of music completely foreign to the audience – the band closed with a few songs from 2007’s Widow City and “Worry Worry” from Gallowsbird’s Bark before returning to the stage for an encore with “Single Again.”

All in all, the show was the sort of intimate experience every fan hopes for as his favorite band gets bigger and bigger, but one that’s usually the stuff of fantasy. Last night, though, it was all real.

I’ve been reviewing music for a few years now, and regardless of the quality of the CD I’m discussing, I try to give every record a good shot. To give a fair assessment of an album, I feel like I have to spin it at least a few times before I come to any conclusions.

But as I listened to 311’s rap-rock retread Uplifter for the first, fifth, fourteenth times, I found myself struggling to come up with anything to say that I couldn’t have said months before I had heard it at all or in fact anything I couldn’t have said about the band when they were churning out identical tunes a decade or two ago. Part of me considered just copying and pasting a review of 311’s 1995 self-titled breakthough.

Maybe that was a bit harsh, but let me tell you why negative music reviews always seem especially acerbic. Music critics are always, first and foremost, music fans. Some call themselves aficionados or audiophiles, but regardless, they enjoy listening to music. So when they’re tasked with reviewing a garbage record and are forced to listen to it whole bunch in lieu of something they like, that bile inevitably seeps into the review.

For the last week, I’ve had to listen to 311.

Despite a layoff since 2005’s Don’t Tread on Me, 311 are still holding fast to the formula that got them where they are: a lilting reggae rhythm with a crunchy metal center. Throw in some slap bass, add some shitty lyrics (“I drink you in with a sip/But I really want to chug“—seriously?), and call it a day. Why the hell did this take four years?

Occasionally, there are some minor stylistic exceptions to the rule. “My Heart Sings” is an uncharacteristically light affair, “Get Down” is straight up hip-hop, and “Golden Sunlight” finishes up as something of a pop-punk number. Ultimately, though, Uplifter never once strays from that fun-in-the-sun pseudo-insouciance.

When your music is mostly innocuous to begin with, the status quo won’t get you very far, and this is why Uplifter fails: no risks, no statement, no ambition whatsoever. It’s an album that never needed to be made—or, for that matter, heard.

This is a good and a bad thing.

On the positive side, it’s the best song on the band’s newest record, Veckatimest. It’s probably the best track in Grizzly Bear’s entire catalogue and, nearing the halfway point, is a frontrunner for “Song of the Year.” Ed Droste’s vocals soar on this track, and the epic harmonies push it over the top. The tone on those keys is tough to beat, too.

But such a dynamic song doesn’t really fit on an otherwise understated album. The harmonies and intricate arrangements pop up on just about every song on the record, but nowhere else can you find the immediacy of “Two Weeks.” It could be excused, though, if “Two Weeks” detracted only from the record’s cohesiveness, but in comparison, the rest of the album seems to ramble a bit aimlessly, taking only baby steps from 2006’s Yellow House when a profound step forward is clearly within reason.

Veckatimest certainly has a lot going for it. It’s dramatic without being sappy, pleasant without being completely innocuous. And frankly, there isn’t a band out there who sounds anything like Grizzly Bear. Ultimately, though, Veckatimest doesn’t seem fully realized, meandering and messing around when the band seems fully capable of buckling down and focusing.

“Two Weeks” doesn’t just hint at the potential for more: it openly flaunts it. Beyond the atmospheric haunt of “I Live With You,” the romance of “Ready, Able,” the languidness and leisure of “Fine For Now,” Grizzly Bear is capable of something much more actualized, and Veckatimest only teases it.

Even without “Two Weeks,” however, Veckatimest would be able to stand up as an album. It wanders, sure, but not without a consistent orchestral sobriety guiding it as it does. For every vocal question mark, there’s a swell of instrumental exclamation points in response. It’s hard to find a corner of this album that doesn’t have at least a little string or woodwind flourish somewhere.

Terms like “art rock” and “chamber pop” get bandied about an awful lot in indie music (or at least in indie music reviews) these days, to the point that they’re virtually meaningless. But while many bands would be content to bring in a session violinist or a sibling who plays French horn, Grizzly Bear takes things a step further. This isn’t a rock album with a few weird instruments thrown on top to shake things up. This is a full-on orchestral record, even when stripped to just guitar.

In fact, this is Veckatimest’s strength: even when the dense arrangements fall to the side, when the lush harmonies disappear and it’s just Droste or Dan Rossen and walls of reverb, even when the urgency fades and the music seems to lilt along with the breeze, there’s still some kind of necessity present. Never do things seem self-indulgent or superfluous.

Everything on Veckatimest, from the loftiest harmony to the subtlest string pluck, serves a purpose, even if there’s room for a little more. And even if there’s room, there’s only one Grizzly Bear.