Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

so this is going to be a new EP, YEAH!:

http://pitchfork.com/news/36753-animal-collectives-avey-tare-reveals-all-about-new-ep-film-tour-hiatus/

I'm pretty excited about the film. Sounds non-narrative and psychedelic!

In Hogan's P4k review of Neon Indian, he pretty much nails what I'm talking about. But isn't complaining about it like I am.

Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.

Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.

There you go that is perfect!

Glo-fi, I think, is a really good term for it. One thing I remember about being a kid in the 80s is that everything was glowing with this digital haze. I'm thinking TV commercials with vector graphics (lines of glowing light) and the fuzzy appearance of analog video technology. Then you had all these pop songs drenched in digital reverb (or at least the snare drum). So the music was kind of glowing.

Well, plus the fondness for bright pastel colors and simple primaries, retro 50s "populuxe" color schemes and design. There definitely was a neon simplicity to popular youth culture in general. What's funny is how precise and clear it seemed at the time, in contrast to drab, brown 70s-realist fuzziness. It was an era of sharpness, not of haze, at least in terms of how it narrated itself to itself. Pac Man/Tron graphic were (or seemed) idealized & clean, like Esprit stripes & Jellies.

Retrospectively, that all changes. VHS vs. Blu-Ray.

so it's 80s + weed basically

man so much of this stuff is gonna date so badly

Dream-beat, chillwave

yeah some of this stuff on the memory tapes album makes me think of bowery electric circa "lushlife". weren't there a cluster of groups that kinda went on this shoegaze meets trip hop thing for a little while in the mid-90s? not making a direct comparison, it just REMINDS me is all

x-post I dunno does revivalism ever really "date"?

Think about how electroclash just continues and continues and continues, just changing its name and scene-configuration every couple of years.

Perhaps what doe date w/r/t revivalism is just the sense that you cared, like "lol we were into that." So you can be contemptuous of your former enjoyment of hype-moments like britpop/elephant six/"the new rock revolution"/electroclash/hypnagogic pop, even though in fact all of the specific sounds those terms are meant to describe continue to hang around like bits of food between yr teeth.

Oh I for one expect all of these artists will enjoy enduring relevance at par with Dance Disaster Movement and Test Icicles.

There's a big difference b/w "dating" and "enjoying enduring relevance" though. Lots of music slips out of popular consciousness b/c it's not interesting or good enough even to be tied down to a particular point of time.

Test Icicles sounded awful at the time even.

Should say there's a big difference between "not dating" and "enjoying enduring relevance"...

yah tim i know what you mean, i think its more just like ... yeah the strokes seem to have aged pretty well, but lol the vines ... where the 'movement' helps a lot of mediocre shit get thru the 'filter' just because it happens to follow this sound .... obviously i resist the idea that a wack band cant drop an exciting one-off accidentally, or that those spearheading a movement necessarily deserve more 'credit' for their music than latecomers, but at some point discernment seems to take a back seat. i mean, have you sat thru that ducktails album? i downloaded & deleted it TWICE i was trying so hard to get into it

but maybe i dont smoke enough weed

Dunno Tim. I mean, music: it's good or it isn't, isn't it? And there's nothing much new about this whole thing, it's just what Pitchfork is talking about. I fail to see a massive difference between most of these acts and, say, early Boards of Canada, or as mentioned above early Seefeel. I mean some of this sounds like Land of the Loops, guys. These acts are exploring the same territory with less resources and different conceptual pretensions. Having the bliss without the gothy/gothic and pretty forced obtuseness of those geometric days (something M83 has tried to purge with his flowery images but is so inextricably tied to musically it's a lost cause) is refreshing, but it's new clothes, not new ideas or expressions. "Crazy For You" x infinity.

or alternately, im slightly too young for the references to hit me emotionally, & w/ very few of these artists is there something else to grab on to (but then, you should be too young too haa)

when i heard neon indian some of the traxx def seemed to stand out more to me

I like the Ducktails stuff well enough, though it doesn't compel me to investigate deep glo-wave scene knowledge. Plus it makes my GF call me a hippie. Agree that the more this becomes a thing, the less interesting any given example of it becomes, and the more mystifying it'll all seem in a few years.

OTOH, Ducktails, specifically, get a pass cuz it's really just stoner wall-gaze soundtracks with zero commercial prospects, and that shit's eternal.

Deej and Cott, I agree with your last two points absolutely - and this stuff will totally date in the sense of "lol we were into that, how could we swallow the hype hook line and sinker" (ftr I'm not really, every band i've checked out described in these terms just sounds like post-rock crossed with drone to me, but maybe i'm checking the wrong stuff? I haven't listened to Ducktails or Neon Indian).

I just tend to think of "dated vs not dated", "good vs bad" and "duly hyped vs overhyped" as different conceptual categories - i.e. gated snare drums became "dated" but lots of amazing music has gated snare drums and often the drums sound fantastic. Warm, simple analogue recording techniques can't "date" anymore but a lot of bad or boring music is made in that fashion.

The whole sidechain/DSP hard compression shortcut to sounding better-than-indie is one of the most painful developments in audio history. This Neon Indian record sounds like moments of Disco Inferno records played through a Distressor.

painful indeed, the ducktails stuff i listened to had some nice things going on but it was too unplesantly harsh sounding for me to handle. i have no problem with lo-fi shit but DUDE FIX YR LEVELS

yah thats fair -- i think whats 'dating' to me is the conceptual pretense

when i heard neon indian some of the traxx def seemed to stand out more to me

― i got nothin (deej), Tuesday, 13 October 2009 23:50 (Yesterday)

probably because there is only one good neon indian song. i really like hypnagogic pop in theory, and i imagine there's a lot of good stuff i haven't heard yet and i'm just not keeping up with but much of it it seems is high on cool production and low on good melodies.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6f/Animal_Collective_Fall_Be_Kind.jpg

Fall Be Kind is an upcoming EP by Animal Collective, to be released on November 23rd 2009 (digitally) and 14th December (physically).
Recorded by Ben Allen at Sweet Tea in Oxford, MS in February 2008 and at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, NY August 2009, Fall Be Kind includes recent live favorites "Graze" and "What Would I Want? Sky" (featuring the first ever licensed Grateful Dead sample).

1. Graze
2. What Would I Want? Sky
3. Bleed
4. On A Highway
5. I Think I Can

I finally got around to listening to this and only really liked "My Girls".

i like this band and enjoyed 'sung tongs' and 'feels' but something keeps me from really getting to them. i've prob listened to MPP like twice. 'my girls' is kind of annoying

love the panda bear album tho. prob my favorite AC-related thing

i tried hard with this, but it is not good imo

"My Girls" is the standout, I think - it seems to have a little more swing in it - elsewhere on the album the rhythms tend to be a bit too ploddingly mid-tempo. But I think this is still one of the more interesting indie albums of recent times - one of the few that seems to inhabit the same contemporary musical universe that includes techno-futurist R&B like Beyonce.

imo if you want to hear stuff in this general vein that isn't squarely at the worst possible midpoint between aimless ambient noodling and overearnest whining, pick up Moderat

"What Would I Want? Sky" (featuring the first ever licensed Grateful Dead sample)"

which is from Unbroken Chanin taking from The Mars Hotel album.maybe the only decent song from that record.

would never think of the moderat as an equivalent but it is a much better album. Ur all mad tho brothersport is the highlight

there's a mediafire link out there for this with a bunch of crap 80s songs rickrolled in, but i don't have the heart to post it here.

still feels weird to be in the pro-MPP camp (tho i wasn't much of a fan before), rate this over Moderat even

would never think of the moderat as an equivalent but it is a much better album

In truth that comparison came about because I encountered "My Girls" on the Modeselektor Body Language mix, which ends with "A New Error"; in the context of that mix, they both inhabit a similar vibe. I recognize that one isn't a direct substitute for the other.

also the cover art is prob the shittiest of the decade

new animal collector ;-)

http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs258.snc1/10535_279983485371_694900371_9330911_6411022_n.jpg

there's a mediafire link out there for this with a bunch of crap 80s songs rickrolled in, but i don't have the heart to post it here.

― YOUR MOMS SPOT HERON WITH NO HANDS I'M SMACKIN HER (Beatrix Kiddo), Tuesday, 10 November 2009 21:49 (Yesterday) Bookmark

something tells me this should already be somewhere on this thread.

What Would I Want? Sky is great (at least the live version I heard).

Agree with what others said that "My Girls" is the standout. I like AC, and Panda Bear, when they're incorporating those sunshine pop influences and harmonies. The other, more noodling, songs aren't always bad but it's just not worth returning to.

i hope what would i want? sounds a little less like moby than i remember

not a fan of the vocals in "what would i want sky" judging from live bootlegs i've heard. to me what's great about MPP is that avey tare grew out of alot of what made his vocals so awkward and unpleasant to listen to on strawberry jam. it's not quite a return to the greatness of the vocals on feels but alot of beautiful crooning. and yeah, "what would i want" sounds like it could've been on strawberry jam.

*but a lot of beautiful crooning nonetheless.

*but a lot of beautiful crooning nonetheless.

at this point i'm more pro-bro sport than pro-MPP, but it's still a better album than strawberry jam was imo

because idolator readers DEMAND IT:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ytmxc4k2qzm

behold!

Nobody has ever sampled the Grateful Dead before??????

I guess Phish get by on a technicality.

Fall Be Kind is now leaking!

this is really, really good. i think Animal Collective are possibly hitting their peak right now as this is so much better than it's suppose to be.

the harmonies on 'what would i want? sky', absent from the npr/live versions, is very pleasing!