Animal Collective paint with all the colours of the rainbow

From cover to lyrics to the colours the sounds daub across your cortex, this is an album designed as a piece of art, not a collection of tracks – like paint pushed around a palette, each stroke heavy with oils and influence.

While the first half of the album is full of frenetic tracks like “FloriDada” and “The Burglars” that push forward there are plenty that shift into what feels like an old friend on a new day.

Painting With is not of an entirely different order but a continuation of a sound stretched out further and further over recent projects. There are less familiar things to grip onto initially but a cacophony of splendour that grows and grows in its beauty the better you tune in.

This is a much more frantic version of Animal Collective than seen in many years and feels like a project with a focus on the veracity of life in a world both in and out of pop, like the waves which take modern and contemporary art in and out of that space. Taken as it’s found, as one always should take everything, it’s more of a challenge than other projects, in parts, but comes with no less of a payoff.

The interweaving vocals of Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) run through the record with their classic golden thread – chanting, whirring and popping as an aural guide to a rolling landscape.

From dinosaurs to creepy John Cale vocals “Hocus Pocus” isn’t instantly easy but is subtle, fascinating and bold in all the right places, while “Lying in the Grass”, which features wonder-saxophonist Colin Stetson, is a standout moment. There is a stillness within it, where you can feel yourself at the centre, with everything swirling around you. Beautiful sections glitter in a moving background turning the track from an impressive experiment to an fully-formed triumph.

Keeping it real, most certainly on this record the band seem to be firmly doing exactly what they want and not simply fulfilling the inevitability of the next thing. There are some striking, startling and sublime moments on Painting With, even if it is at times a little dis-jointed. It may be a project designed to have less easy entry points than Merriweather Post Pavilion or Feels, but it certainly doesn’t have any diminished capacity to enchant and leave a lasting taste dancing in concentric circles.

The second side of the record is packed with that very sublime thing, and full of voice: “On Delay” pulls through some of the clarity of the past with vocals wrapped around every single moment; “Spilling Guts” is a tenacious chant and “Golden Gal” has a glimmer of a fabulous strength.

In a world where you can see the colour of gravitational waves an album like this is not out of place – it’s a work of great weight and a masterpiece of colour.