It's a bit unfair and perhaps even inaccurate to lump the Animal Collective in with the core players of the freak folk scene; yet many a young music scribe puts them right up there with freak folk progenitors Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. Rather than trying to retrospectively emulate the ghosts of Greenwich Village’s former folk scene (like Tiny Tim or Karen Dalton), the Animal Collective are much more interested in fusing shards of that bygone, bearded bard sect with more re...  [+]