Feels

Recorded in Seattle with Scott Colburn, Feels is known for its unusual guitar sound, which came in part from a tuning (E G# E G# B E) that Weitz explained on the Collected Animals forum. The songs were tuned to loops he and Portner had made from recordings of a friend's piano, which was out of tune to begin with, and when Kristin Valtysdottir played piano in the studio they had a tuner detune the studio's instrument to match. The viola player Eyvind Kang came in for an afternoon, listened to each song once and improvised. Colburn said each vocal was recorded with six microphones. Portner made the cover art from the images of a children's educational guide he found on the street.

Richardson of Pitchfork wrote that the group sound, for the first time, like what detractors always said they were, an indie rock band, and called Banshee Beat among the best things they had done. Metacritic gives it 84. Pitchfork placed it 55th among the 200 best albums of the 2000s, and it was third in The Wire's critics' poll. By 2008 it had sold 55,000 copies in the US.