Can you decipher Animal Collective's visual album ODDSAC?

With vampire monks and a satanic Gordon Ramsay, ODDSAC is certainly a sight for sore eyes. But has anyone got a clue what it actually means?

The idea of a "visual album" certainly isn't a new one: you could argue that the cinematic versions of Tommy and The Wall or Super Furry Animals' project to release videos to all of the songs on Rings Around the World would fulfil the criteria. But Animal Collective's ODDSAC, four years in the making alongside film-maker Danny Perez and released in July, is a more uncompromising attempt to make a piece of music and film whereby each only makes sense when accompanied by the other – the sounds are enhanced by the images, and the images reflect the mood and timbre of the sounds.

It's an intriguing concept and one that, on first viewing at last week's preview screening, resembled a DV vampire flick directed by David Lynch (if he was into experimental hypno-tronica), making for a confrontational and immersive experience. Although not one you'd want to repeat on hallucinogens. Even though that kind of seems like the point.

It's undoubtedly "art", but how to fathom the meaning of such a mind-frazzling piece full of vampire monks, demonic fakirs and lengthy episodes of trance-inducing pattern loops? Let's run through it in full and give it a go. Warning: includes spoilers. Although I've no idea what they spoil.

Scene/song one: Introductory shots of fire and grassland give way to a night shot of distant flame jugglers accompanied by a red-painted fakir wearing a turban that covers his eyes. Meanwhile, a blonde girl is tugging at the peeling wallpaper in a tatty room, releasing gushes of oil from beneath. The music is warped afrobeat electronica over which distorted vocals sing, "Grandma used to love how you play."

Scene/song two: As the music descends into an intense whirring throb, we enter a section of hypnotic repetitive visuals of oil and spinning flames that feels like being beaten in the face with a copy of the Charlatans' Some Friendly album sleeve for five minutes. Occasionally, a "drumbeat" of screaming Lemmys or oil-covered heads bursts out of the screen.

Scene/song three: Freakish monks with paint peeling from their faces babble inaudible Exorcist-speak to camera, like a nightmare version of Mighty Boosh's council of mystics. Elsewhere, a grunting Neanderthal washes white balls in a river along to an abstract electronic instrumental. Unexpected scare-shots of the monk freaks suggest that the producers of The Ring may have a hand in all this.

Scene/song four: One monk rows a boat across a misty lake at night to the first recognisable 'song' of the album; a Beach Boys-meets-Fleet Foxes folk number that seems to have been fed through an Autotune set to "random". It's spooky and rather marvellous.

Scene/song five: A corridor of light reminiscent of the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey leads us into a graphic loop like iTunes Visualiser reprogrammed by a psychopath. The audio is an unsettling cacophony of submarine radar blips, chiming bells, Bedlam babble and electronic cat fights. Suspicions arise that Derren Brown has a hand in all this.

Scene/song six: A pebble beach, daytime. A white-haired skater creature starts to assemble a drumkit on the rocks to a pastoral arpeggio and the sound of a dabbling brook. A false sense of security is suspected. And sure enough, the second the skater monster beats his first skin, deafening demonic hell drums crackle out, accompanied by intercuts to the screaming Lemmy from scene/song two, who turns out to be a medieval warrior swinging a stone on a piece of string. The song itself rages somewhere between Neutral Milk Hotel and They Might Be Giants, and features the sound of a Kraken burping and the lyric "Never try the simple thing". Well quite.

Scene/song seven: A plot! The rowing monk reveals his vampiric fangs as he stalks a family through some woodland. As the mother washes clothes in a stream and toasts marshmallows with her husband and children at their campsite, breathy vocals hiss "wrap your arms around me" to a police siren melody. The family find the marshmallows too hot and begin spewing huge streams of molten sugar from their mouths, just as the vampire monk attacks and savages one of their children to the sounds of insane techno. Then the sun comes up, and the vampire flees, steaming from the head and eventually dissolving in eruptions of blue paint from his skull.

Scene/song eight: The blind fakir from scene/song one is now in the tatty room, overseeing a cookery lesson with the blond girl and three of her friends. The girls make baby noise,s while the fakir bellows incoherent instructions at them, like an even more satanic Gordon Ramsay. They start a funky food fight along to one of Animal Collective's catchiest pop tunes, yet until the camera draws back to reveal the final twist: the room is actually in the grassland! Eat your heart out, M Night Shyamalan! The song fades out with the line "what happened?"

So, um, what happened? Is it all an elaborate Iraq war allegory? A laptop generation remake of Nosferatu? An enthralling experiment pushing at the amorphous boundaries between sound and vision? Or just a bunch of art-school wannabes fannying about in a forest? Let's connect with our inner Robert Hughes and figure it out…

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