A few years ago, you could happily have called the full-length video album a forgotten art. They were big in the early 80s, when video was widely held to be on the verge of killing the radio star and everyone from Devo to Olivia Newton-John had a go. Then they vanished. On a prosaic level, that was perhaps because the video album made music less utilitarian: you can't do anything else while it's on, you just have to sit there and give it your full and undivided attention. You could argue that's no bad thing, but, equally, there was something obviously reductive about the video album's artistic effect on music. One of the pleasures of a great album is the way it allows the listener to conjure up pictures in their head: it's hard to do that when you have to look at someone else's. To borrow the phrase Clive James deployed when confronted with Robert Plant in his Led Zeppelin pomp, you could hardly hear for looking.
Recently, though, the video album has made a comeback. The Chemical Brothers have done one, but it's mostly an alt-rocker trend: the Archie Bronson Outfit, Bombay Bicycle Club, Beach House, Liars, the Young Knives. The Chemical Brothers' game attempt to bring their live show's visual overload into your living room aside, the new wave of video albums frequently seem like an afterthought: bit of deluxe edition added-value to try to lure punters away from file-sharing sites.
That's not an accusation you could level at Animal Collective's Oddsac, a collaboration with film-maker and former Black Dice roadie Danny Perez. It was so long in the making that its soundtrack most closely resembles not last year's more commercial album Merriweather Post Pavillion, but the more freeform stuff that came before. There are two undeniably great songs on the soundtrack – one an impossibly beautiful drift of electronically treated vocal harmonies that suddenly explodes into thunderous drumming, the other a plaintive acoustic track – but also there are interminable passages where you search in vain among the murky electronic textures for a tune. But then, Animal Collective seem to have been issued a free pass among rock critics: hacks turn a blind eye to the sneaking feeling that, at their worst, they resemble a kind of hipster's jam band, the Pitchfork Phish. Indeed, the only immediate critical danger the quartet face is that a blogger might be crushed to death beneath the weight of his purple prose: "Animal Collective boast an ability to have origin disappear while maintaining geographical otherness" and so on.
It's hard not to feel even the most ardent blogger is going to have their work cut out attaching superlatives to Oddsac, an hour of abstract imagery clearly influenced by the artist Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, but devoid of even the loose sense of structure found in Barney's five films. That said, if your idea of a great evening in involves watching someone in a long blonde wig and flared trousers slowly assemble a drumkit while a bearded man in velvet robes waves a lasso and shouts at him, get your credit card out: your audio-visual experience of the year is here.
Elsewhere, a man juggles fire while a woman attempts to stem a flow of black paint from a wall, a family camping in the woods are picked off by a combination of exploding marshmallows and a bad hat with a white face, cape and head shaved save for a long black pony tail – when the Whitby goth weekender goes bad! – and a group of indie girls find their baking session disrupted by the appearance of a red figure in a fringed, bulbous head-dress that makes him look like a cross between Homer Simpson, Rick Wakeman and a penis, before falling to the floor and gigglingly smearing each other with food. The latter most closely resembles a fetid dream had by the kind of blogger who writes about Animal Collective's ability to have origin disappear while maintaining geographic otherness.
What the whole thing most obviously recalls is not the video albums of the 80s, but the rock films of a decade before, replete with dream sequences that were obviously the product of someone watching Fellini's 8½ while stoned and coming to the desperately erroneous conclusion they could do that, too: The Song Remains The Same, Journey Through the Past, Be Thankful for the Song Has No Ending. The difference is that, in keeping with the countercultural era, you somehow knew those films were engaged in the act of Trying to Make a Point. Oddsac clearly isn't: it's just a load of abstract imagery. That doesn't make it any less boring, but it makes it less pretentious. As anyone whose camping trip has ended without any marshmallow-based fatalities and a visit from a murderous goth with tell you: you have to be thankful for small mercies.
