There are two opposing schools of thought regarding Animal Collective. One holds that the Baltimore quartet are adventurous sonic pioneers, whose restlessly exploratory oeuvre has succeeded in carving out an entirely new, 21st-century take on pastoral psychedelia, deserving of solemn appreciation and the most purple of praise: “[They mean] to create a dream land where music can sound equally gorgeous and transcendent if the anemone doesn’t sting you. Thus, the manatee stings sharply anyone who expects his danse to sound accessible or in any way like reality,” as one reviewer said of their 2010 album Danse Manatee. The other views Animal Collective as tiresomely smug, pretentious hippies, whose music has less in common with the fearless psychedelia of the 60s than the self-indulgent noodling of latter-day jam bands: they’re the Pitchfork Phish, and something ineffable about their music suggests its authors are the kind of people who insist on telling you about that time they went camping and took mushrooms every time you meet them.

Their recent work offers ample evidence for both readings, occasionally on the same album, as evinced by 2011’s half-transcendent, half-infuriating Centipede Hz. And sometimes the people trying to persuade you of the former interpretation of their worth end up convincing you of the latter, which brings us to Painting With. Its release was heralded by a lengthy, reverential US interview, in which it was revealed that the band “talked about cave people before we wrote any music”, that they visualised the album as “an electronic drum circle” and recorded it at the legendary LA studio once known as Western. Alas, the room that had once rung to the sound of Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Michael Jackson’s Thriller required modification before it was fit for purpose. “They brought in a baby pool. They dimmed the lights and lit candles. And they projected dinosaurs on to the walls, whirling the group millions of years into the past.”

You don’t need to be a fanatical student of rock history to know that this is very much the kind of thing that, 40 years ago, provoked otherwise reasonable people to stick safety pins through their noses and gob at each other. We really do appear to be inches away from Yes recording an album based on the shastric teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda in a studio filled with hay bales and a model of a cow. Punk’s great argument against progressive rock was that prog represented a triumph of virtuosity over feeling, which is certainly a criticism that could be levelled at parts of Painting With. It’s an album big on a vocal technique in which Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox and Dave “Avey Tare” Portner duet by singing not alternating words, but alternating syllables of each word, a disorientating effect presumably intended to approximate having your brains tossed like salad by hallucinogens. It crops up over and over again, on Hocus Pocus, Summing the Wretch, Lying in the Grass and the closing Recycling, and is obviously a feat involving either considerable agility or technical skill. But after a while, the sound of it becomes almost supernaturally annoying, like a bore who won’t stop doing his party trick.

You can be impressed by the dextrous way the rhythm of The Burglars rolls and shifts in constant, skittering motion, but the result sounds absolutely horrible. Worse, it isn’t horrible in a deliberately confrontational or creepy or cathartic way. It sounds self-consciously zany, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that – in search of a succinctness lacking in Animal Collective’s more expansive albums – almost everything on Painting With zips along at breakneck pace: they’ve compared it to the work of the Ramones. Natural Selection has a lovely melody, but it’s lashed to the kind of fast, funkless, four-to-the-floor thud you hear in awful Mitteleuropean oompah pop-techno. It’s hard to listen to the opening FloriDada – with its punning title and its brilliant, inventive hookline (a gleeful Beach Boysish vocal backed by an unlikely surge of gothic, Dracula-at-the-keyboard organ) buried amid a landslide of 80s computer game noises, chattering vocals and samples of the laugh from the Surfaris’ Wipe Out – without imagining its authors seated in the studio control room, dinosaurs on the walls, listening back and making conspiratorial “we’re nutty” faces at each other.

But, for all that, you can’t just dismiss Painting With. Amid the stuff that seems to be going out of its way to drive you up the wall, there are moments when the album works to pretty dazzling effect. Vertical achieves the album’s aim of making concise, direct music without sacrificing any of Animal Collective’s originality: the vocals wrap around each other in a way that doesn’t make you want to reach into the speakers and bang their heads together, the tune lurches forward in a way that’s both unexpected and weirdly satisfying. Golden Gal is a song in which Animal Collective empathise with women who feel objectified, but is nothing like as ghastly as that sounds: it dials the tempo and sonic clutter back to reveal a really beautiful melody, and it feels sincere rather than smirky. Bagels in Kiev opens with precisely the kind of droning ambience that was supposed to be verboten on Painting With, then unfurls into a song on which the busy musical backdrop sounds sumptuous rather than messy.

You’re left with an album on which smug self-indulgence is matched with genuine inventiveness. Painting With won’t change anyone’s mind about Animal Collective, or even help the undecided make theirs up. The devotees will doubtless be more devoted than ever after listening to it, objectors can still find plenty of reason to object, and perhaps that’s what the band want. “We want to have our own sound, and we understand that it’s for some people and not others,” said Portner recently; on those terms, at least, Painting With succeeds.