| Urb |
 Rafter Roberts is often as direct as he is ambitious. His first collection of tunes was simply titled 10 Songs and that’s exactly what the San Diego-based musician/producer/engineer with a penchant for doing things himself and creating catchy pop-rock quirk delivered. He followed that with the musical self-help and common sense compendium Music For Total Chickens where he offered all the uplifting advice he’d always wanted to hear. His third LP Sex Death Cassette took on more consequential subjects such as the intersections of life and love, and from those sessions he went directly into a song-a-day project where as the name implied he wrote and recorded one song a day for months. Several of those impromptu cuts found their way onto his Sweaty Magic EP where he cut loose with off center dance-pop sounds. Through it all he’s kept the sounds lo-fi, the recordings clean and the arrangements rewardingly deep.
So it fits perfectly that he’s titled his most visceral pop-rock blowout Animal Feelings and loaded it with some of the catchiest songs about falling in love and enjoying every moment to come around in a while. As if to punctuate that he was feeling on his game this time out, Rafter opens the set with a talkbox warped declaration of “No fucking around” on a song of the same name and then delivers 11 jams with the punchy beats, soulful leads, thoughtful lyrics and good time feelings to make that brash statement ring true. With his off-center take on the pop side of rock, Rafter is having and sharing a lot of fun on this album. He’s put together a full set of songs that smuggle welcome surprises that keep the good feelings resonating long after his sounds stop pushing from the speakers.
At their core, Rafter’s latest are songs about the excitement of love, but as with all his work, nothing is as simple as it seems. In control of every step of the recording, he lines up his instruments so the punching horns never send the breezy guitars off course and the bottom-funk keys play nice with the tumbledown rhythms that can never seem to collect enough handclaps and found sounds. Whether it’s slowly easing the Stevie Wonder-style funk keys into a more naked piano on “Feels Good” or building up the noises to crash over a peak on “Never Gonna Die,” Rafter layers up his simple forms to make them completely his own. Song-A-Day survivors “Fruit” and “Paper” respectively bring afro-pop and dance-punk to the affair while “Timeless Form, Formless Time” and “Beauty, Beauty” let their music and lyrics revel in the simple joys of life’s complexities. This is an album loosely forged in all those places where pop, rock, funk and soul congregate and it’s hard to imagine it all coming together much better....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| “Get your ass out on the floor,” Rafter Roberts sings at one point on Animal Feelings, and for the first time, it feels like he could get a crowd to follow him. He tried mixing his love of R&B and Pop with a capital P with his indie roots previously on the Sweaty Magic EP, but there it felt half-baked -- not because he didn’t love and understand the influences he was borrowing from, but because he hadn’t quite gotten them to play nicely together yet. Here, Rafter brings those sounds into focus without losing the kitchen-sink charm of his earlier music. Animal Feelings gets back to (human) nature, singing the joys of simple but vital things like love, lust, and dancing. “No Fucking Around” gets right to the point, opening the album with funky vocoder vocals and cowbell, but its singsong melody is pure indie pop. The big, surprisingly muscular sound of “Never Gonna Die”’s tribal beat and “Paper”’s lush layers show that Rafter can make pure pop without sacrificing any of his personality -- and that, in fact, going in a more streamlined direction allows his mischievous spirit to come out and play to its fullest. Animal Feelings shines particularly brightly when Roberts juxtaposes unexpected sounds, like the title track’s honky tonk pianos and bongos, or when 8-bit synths jostle against ukulele riffs and a shouted chorus on the excellent and very danceable “A Frame.” He’s better at this kind of musical alchemy than trying to replicate his influences; the vocoders come close to parody on the slow jam “Feels Good.” Likewise, Rafter is at his best when the songs are cute, but not cutesy -- the (slightly) more grown-up sounds of “Timeles Form, Formless Time”’s sweet Afro-pop guitars, brass, and harmonies and the Latin-tinged “Beauty Beauty” are standouts. Animal Feelings is still more sweet than sweaty, and may not get indie diehards to shake what their mamas gave them. Nevertheless, it more than delivers on the promise of Rafter’s earlier music and fits right in with YACHT, Dan Deacon, Bobby Birdman, and the other acts fusing electronic, pop, R&B, and indie pop elements into playful grooves....full text |
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| Avclub |
| On his early solo albums, San Diego producer/performer Rafter Roberts favored the fragmented and experimental, but Rafter’s fourth LP, Animal Feelings, is loaded with so many thick hooks and fat, dance-floor-friendly beats that it could sail right into the mainstream, if not for the frequent use of the word “fuck.” The biggest problem with Animal Feelings is that it feels too easy. Rafter is such a skilled technician that he barely has to break a sweat to whip up a fizzy hip-hop/indie-pop mix that would turn Beck green, and too often, Animal Feelings never advances far enough beyond one quickly grasped musical/lyrical idea. Sometimes those lyrics are distressingly cloying, too, as on “Love Makes You Happy (When It’s Not Making You Sad),” which rhymes “none of this can get you down” with “’cause you turned your frown upside-down.” At other times, though, Rafter’s reduction of his songs to their catchiest elements proves winning, as on “Timeless Form, Formless Time,” where exotic rhythms underscore the giddiness of new love. And when Rafter goes the extra step and fills out Animal Feelings songs like “No Fucking Around” and “Paper” with complete thoughts and richer arrangements, he becomes the kind of sonic guru worth heeding....full text |
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