Front page photo by Atiba Jefferson

The last time Dave Portner released music apart from Animal Collective, it was in the form of 2010's low-key, moody LP Down There, an intriguing mix of soundscapes and drifting elegies that addressed a difficult period in Portner's personal life. The songs collected on Down There sounded swampy and waterlogged, so "Little Fang", the first single from Enter the Slasher House, the debut from his new band Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, is a welcome surprise.

The jangly, sauntering cut still retains some of Portner's trademarks from his work in Animal Collective and by his lonesome—a distinct sense of murkiness, stray sound effects that sound as if they were ripped from a funhouse ride—but the melody is pleasingly straightforward, a glammy earworm reminiscent of fellow Los Angeles denizen and cosmic brethren Ariel Pink. Both Animal Collective and Portner make music that, more often than not, resists easy categorization, so who knows whether the rest of Enter the Slasher House (out April 7 internationally and the following day in the U.S. via Domino) will sound like this—but even if it doesn't, the simple pleasures of "Little Fang" will surely remain intact.