The evolution of the urban bushwhacker

These three bands differ somewhat in sound, lifestyle and approaches to music-making. But their popularity can be attributed to the same thing: the ever-renewable urge within the middle class to step away from the timetables of life and find a different source of meaning. Going off-trail is an apt metaphor for what earlier generations thought of as shedding the gray flannel suits. Moguls don't wear suits now, but they'd never enter a space where their cellphone reception might be endangered. Urban bushwhackers try to imagine that space, even though they often use laptops and sequencers to do so.

Animal Collective's career has been characterized by forays into the brush. Since evolving from a bunch of childhood friends into a band around a decade ago, the group became strongly identified with the East Coast avant-rock scene and the more scattered "psych folk" trend. Its sound is hard to describe, let alone classify; it pulls from post-techno dance music, world rhythms, harmony groups and playful 1960s folk-rockers like the Holy Modal Rounders.

The band's sound is as intentionally bewildering (and goofy) as its members' silly stage names (Avey Tare and Panda Bear, for example), and its fanboy followers have turned the game of this music into an obsession. Fans hail AC shows as near-religious experiences and pore over their recordings as if they were I Ching oracle tosses.

The AC catalog may overflow with tangential forays that will interest only true believers. But such undirected play is what bushwhacking is all about.

Like the Grateful Dead, AC fetishizes process over catchiness. This band likes to stretch time and get lost. Its huggy psychedelia doesn't stimulate nostalgia for the hippie era as much as for the early days of raves and Ecstasy, when the drugs made you want to cuddle and the beats per minute were transcendently intense.

There was something deeply insular about rave culture -- it was a very white, middle-class, college kid thing. AC suffers from this limitation too. Focusing on one another, these four former prep-school buddies mostly have rejected the pop path of imagining a world that's open to all.

"Merriweather Post Pavilion" goes beyond this closed universe by turning Animal Collective's experiments into gelatinous but still graspable song forms. Choruses, hooks and harmonies that undeniably smack of the Beach Boys make it feasible for songs like "My Girls" and "Brother Sport" to get played on the radio. AC's members, all around 30 now, are learning how to focus. Finally, they've made an album in which even nonbelievers can lose themselves.