At least within my sphere, Animal Collective has been an axiom for music going beyond comfortable boundaries for more than a decade now. In that span, there have been blissful highs (a truly transcendent performance at the Wexner Center in 2007) and head-scratching lows (the band’s last mailed-in record, Centipede HZ), but for the most part, they’ve maintained an amorphous and adventurous center that has defined psychedelia in the first echoes of a new century. Myself, and many others, have theorized that their trajectory is, to a degree, parallel to that of the Grateful Dead’s romp through the ’60s and ’70s, one that side-winded into a culture of touring, sonic acid tests on stage, and mining identities as individual troubadours, but only truly clicking as a unified force. The similarities are there. Animal Collective is an essential part of the tape-trading universe. Like the Dead, their shows are essentially improvised jams, with songs floating in and out, and they have a penchant to play melodies that won’t be laid into an album until months (maybe years) later. They are an experience, as much as a band. At that 2007 show, I distinctly remember a kid in a Dead shirt on the corner of 15th and High offering me doses for my ticket to the sold-out love-in. It felt like Animal Collective were on the precipice of something massive.

Though perhaps I’ve grown out of that mindset, there is still a majority who believe it still can exist— just on a smaller scale, with less hope and more irreverence, re-invention, and drums. If we can stretch the comparisons even further, we can contend that Panda Bear is to Jerry Garcia, as Avey Tare is to Bob Weir. Without Jerry, the Dead wouldn’t have transcended, and without Bob, they would probably never have moved. Animal Collective has, for a time now, felt the force of too many brains mucking up the gears. It’s nice when they take time to split, change environments, and see what sticks when muses go awry.

Tare’s Slasher Flicks rolled into Columbus, of course, with the albatross of Animal Collective hanging on full display. Plastic skulls assembled about the stage would screen swirling visuals of color and 8-bit ephemera. Loops of tribal samples played intermittently between songs, trying to bridge the gaps in Tare’s scant collection of songs. Would he rave into the joy fantastic? Would he play “My Girls?” Would faces be melted? Nope, nope, and kinda. Despite the urge for vaporizing youngsters to get a party started, the crest of Tare’s wave never fully crashed into the crowd. That’s not to say he didn’t come close.

As Slasher Flicks, Tare has recruited a formidable “power” trio with Angel Deradoorian (of the Dirty Projectors) securing a phalanx of synths and Jeremy Hyman (formerly of Ponytail) on drums. The former filled the ether with plenty of quietly cooed vocals and a bevy of electronic baubles routine in an Animal Collective set, while the latter became the sinister anchor in Tare’s horror-movie motif, veering between motorik precision and jazzbo metal extremes in the style of someone like Death Grips’ Zach Hill or Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. Hyman’s contribution cannot be undervalued because, despite all of the confections thrown by Tare, it was the drum that took focus for most of the show. The songs on Slasher Flicks’ debut are certainly not lost on a crowd full of Animal Collective devotees, but they are certainly more compact, stripped, and focused squarely on linear melody as opposed to circular abandon. “Duplex Trip” and “Modern Days E” are even suited more for the radio than they are stoner wandering, and that helium-filled psych-pop, reaching readily for the far stretches of the Elephant Six catalog, is what elevated the first third of the performance. Sure, it wasn’t the riotous freakout associated with an Animal Collective show, but it felt tuned-in nonetheless.

From there though, Tare seemed content to stretch his songs too thin, or crowd them with too much, making it hard to follow along; a similar, wallowing nowhere-ness is what has plagued Animal Collective in the past. To speak in terms of totality, these vacuous comedowns are all part of the whole. The chirpy promise of a song like “Little Fang,” though, brought things back to a fever pitch in the finale. For the last waning minutes of the trio’s set, it felt like an experience again, rather than a band exhausting every trick in their arsenal. There was a gel that oozed into sensory overload and a rush that gave the promise of that same future-forward guarantee made by Animal Collective shows of long ago. Tare knows his cog in that machine may not be as welcomed on its own, but he’ll be damned if he’s forced to ride that machine into the cosmos. Not one to sit on his hands for too long, he’s definitely in the business of building his own craft.