Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Fuuuuuuck I hope beta blog is OTM.

I love the font, fwiw.

http://www.myanimalhome.net/index2.html

their most cohesive "album"

this is encouraging. seeing them gradually conglomerate songs into sets over the past couple of tours has been really satisfying. i like feels a lot, but i don't think it really flows (where as i think strawberry jam does, by having distinct phases and moods).

the screamadelica comparison seems apt in light of how danceable some of it seemed at shows. brothersport, &c. is the first song the kind of super-hippie-ish psych one?

Strawberry Jam is their only release that I dislike. I was a bit disappointed in Feels at first, but only in comparison to Sung Tongs, which still stands as one of my favorite albums of the decade.

Were all four involved in the recording? *crossing fingers for avey tare and panda bear only*

i didn't think any album title/cover combo could ever turn me off more than the last one. this is truly the most obnoxiously stupid album title ive ever seen. they're just completely fucking with everybody

and not in a good way

also when did they become a jam band

avey, panda and geo played on the album (no deakin)

(where) is you deakin?

"(They]) said they have many fond memories of the place and wanted to name an album after it," says Seth Hurwitz, the concert promoter whose company, I.M.P., books Merriweather. Hurwitz reports (via late-night email) that he was asked "about a month ago" if the band could use the venue's name for its next album. "I said, 'Cool.'"

they were probably just fucking with that guy, though.

"i didn't think any album title/cover combo could ever turn me off more than the last one."

what's the big deal, it was just a smushed strawberry?

http://spex.de/weblog/archives/5431-Achtung%3A-einige-Neuigkeiten-zu-Animal-Collective.html

here is a babelfish translation:

Attention ¹: Tomorrow evening Animal Collective play a concert in the citizen of Berlin club Berghain - we referred already to it, present the show, everyone may thus as informed regard itself. Attention ²: On 12 January 2009 the new, ninth Animal Collective album appears” Merriweather post office Pavilion “with domino record. That is in the box, it at the beginning of this yearly to the Sweet Tea Recording studio to Oxford, Mississippi with clay/tone engineer Ben everything was already taken up.

Attention ³: The new, ninth Animal Collective album” Merriweather post office Pavilion “is excellently, still - with leaves - more poppiger than so far from that the volume belonged to material and consists of eleven pieces. The title refers to the club of the same name in Baltimore. The second song -” My Girls “- sounds with its jagged-electronically mäandernden underbody almost like a production of Carl Craig, the dreamed and entschleunigte” NO More Runnin “however calls memories to relaxed days at remote bath lakes awake. Brutally well also the machine-rhythm-beaconed and by numerous synthetic sounds disturbed” buzzer time Clothes “, which might be good for interesting, dance-surface-suited Remixes, as well as first the gently there-bubbling are, later however massive with (child) choir singing, Waber Electronica and Bossa rhythm strengthened” Bluish “.

Oh yeah, its a total dance-surface filler!

STRAWBERRY JAM FUCKIN ROOLS SCHOOLZ UR ALL NUTS OR SOMETHING

"The title refers to the club of the same name in Baltimore"

INVISIBLE CLUB
http://dcpages.com/Tourism/Maps/pix/Merriweather_Post_Pavilion.jpg

also its in columbia not baltimore

Why so much 'FEELS' hate? Tis my favorite album.

At least the cover is somewhat interesting... unlike some other recent endeavours of lazy *cough* TVOTR/Bloc Party *cough*

I thought Strawberry Jam was solid, and the EP they put out this year sounded decent. Can't wait for this!

And for the record, 'Feels' is perfect, IMHO.

also when did they become a jam band

wait really

you dont think they were ever jam band-y before this

"it's a studio album and it's amazing. if you witnessed those last round of shows, it's that sound, finally captured. along the trajectories of Person Pitch and the Pantha du Prince remix, but on a whole other level.
my initial reaction (only heard it once) is that it's their Loveless/ Screamadelica, a massive leap forward in sound 'n' frequencies, a total summation of their powers, craft, and influences, their most cohesive "album" and a trip unto itself."

OMG OMG OMG this is exactly what I want.

yeah, tim, i wasn't totally sure what you meant before, but wanted to say that they recorded this with ben allen because of experience with hip hop artists and they wanted someone to accentuate the rhythm and bass of the new songs.

i want an album full of "water curses"-style waterside dance blissouts!

The live show I saw in Berlin in October last year was totally a dance blissout, especially the encore which literally reminded me of "Higher Than The Sun" - a soundtrack for three wise men to travel across intergalactic rave lasers to offer exotic gifts to the starchild in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Closer to home, I guess the second half of "Derek" would be a good reference point too, but the live sound felt a lot fuller.

I'm just coming back from their Berghain show. Liked it a lot. It was very electronic at times, especially towards the end, almost ravey, in a way it reminded me of Underworld. But it was very apart from that it sounded very much like MBV to me. MBV without guitars. But as spacey.

"But apart from that it sounded very much like MBV to me."

Have there been any key live recordings in 2008? I've totally lost track.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14564305
this show form 2007 has most of the new songs on it.

Oh yeah, I have that on my computer already. Never listened to it though. Will remedy.

That live set has real moments of greatness.

The band that AC's development kind of reminds me of is A.R. Kane - with AC's earlier work corresponding to 69 and Strawberry Jam (and hopefully even more so the new album) corresponding to i.

There's that same sense that what starts out as a fascination for pretty-noise being... not abandoned... but recontextualised within a frame of stronger pop songs and hypnotic (v. v. loosely "dance") rhythms, in a way that makes what remains of the original aesthetic actually more precious (in both cases I'm confused by the tendency of people to prefer each band's earlier work).

Water Curses actually reminded me of tracks like "Conundrum", "And I Say" and "HoneySuckleSwallow".

i am very psyched to hear this based on the comments so far. animal collective is one of those bands that i have seen live (for sung tongs i think - it was amazing and wonderfully perplexing to the crowd) and have a few recordings by, but i never took the full plunge.

in both cases I'm confused by the tendency of people to prefer each band's earlier work

know nothing about AR Kane, but preferring AC's earlier stuff because it wasn't just pretty, or rhythmic, or noisy, or any one particular thing except on the verge of bursting into flames. it was disturbing + pretty, or sweet + noisy + scary, or combustible + hypnotic. I'm not as interested in seeing how artists even out over time, smoothing over rough edges to form something that's supposed to be "mature" or a synthesis of what they were driving at before. This happens to most people, artists or not. AC's stuff on Here Comes the Indian, say, was more interesting to me, sonically and certainly emotionally -- maybe because it wasn't "fully formed". That music leaves a lot more to chance, and imo is open to a lot more interpretation. given that it often still comes out weirdly, surreally pretty is kind of an amazing bonus.

Wow, you actually just put into words exactly what I wanted to say.

that is a great post dominique.

Yes, good post Dominique! I do disagree with it though.

"I'm not as interested in seeing how artists even out over time, smoothing over rough edges to form something that's supposed to be "mature" or a synthesis of what they were driving at before."

Dominique you say "I'm not as interested..." which implies you acknowledge this is a personal bias you bring to the table.

If we can agree that maturity or synthesis isn't a universal a priori good, we can probably also agree that the reverse holds true as well - that is, a band's incendiary early work isn't by definition its best. I don't think we can dismiss the possibility that sometimes a maturisation or "smoothing out" of a band's aesthetic can be a positive or productive process. At any rate for the most part I think such terms are applied too quickly and airily, and they ignore what I might call the complex topography of maturity. At this point many developmental arcs come to mind. Can going from Tago Mago to Future Days, Joni Mitchell from Blue to Hejira, Steely Dan from Countdown To Ecstasy to Aja. In each case what seems from one perspective to be a regrettable "smoothing out", "synthesis" of earlier ideas and general "maturation" of sound could equally be characterised as a transformation of the aesthetic landscape into something equally as spiky, as challenging, as difficult, as restless as the previous work.

More generally I think that notions of "maturity" in music are always rather controversial, and whenever people take a strong stand on this issue (for or against) it's usually at least partly a statement about themselves and how they relate to music. In response to this I feel it's important to establish a critical distance from such too-quick partiality. In the above examples I prefer the second album in each duo I listed, and while I might say "maturity" has something to do with it in each case, I could easily list several counter-examples pointing in the other direction. "Maturity" itself is not a property or essence but an articulation; it's the quality of the articulation that is important rather than the presence/absence of the property that is articulated.

In spite of my long screed, I would take issue with any attempt to equate synthesis with maturity, either in general or in the particular case of Animal Collective, though I'm not going to assume you're necessarily arguing that point.

In fact I probably have a corresponding (though opposing) bias in favour of a notion of synthesis that cannot be reduced to maturity or "smoothing out".

I love Here Comes The Indian but prefer Strawberry Jam because I discern in it the same sonic impulses working through and emerging out of a more defined song structure. This doesn't result in an inevitable taming or "smoothing out" of those impulses; if anything I'd argue that the sonic template (and its concomitant sense of possibility, unpredictability and ingenuity) is wildly expanded here; it's as if forcing their imagination through the narrow funnel of "the song" created an irrepressible and explosive friction, the tension between form (song) and content (sound) creating a fizziness and trembliness that is relatively absent in the earlier album because all those interesting sonic ideas have very little to bounce themselves off against. I feel like less is at stake when the songs wander off into noise on Here Comes The Indian because from the outset it presents itself as an excursion into noise (and surely the notion of noise being weirdly pretty is at this point a founding myth (though not an untrue one) of a certain brand of indie-rock and its familiars). In less generous moments Here Comes The Indian strikes me as almost secure in its attempt to play to a particular audience. Whereas Strawberry Jam seems to want to introduce different audiences to one another and watch to find out whether they make friends, war or babies - this isn't about seizing middleground consensus so much as engaging with the risk of confrontation.

Up to and including Feels I think your description of the band's narrative arc makes more sense, as everything up to that point involved a progressive structuration of the band's sound without a corresponding expansion of that sound. Strawberry Jam is the point where I think this story breaks down. This sudden flip (intensified song structure somehow leading into massively broadened sonic horizon) reminds me (as so much stuff does) of the beam of light refracted through the shard to produce a rainbow on the cover of Dark Side of the Moon, and I like the idea of bands subjecting themselves to a radical restriction of scope in order to bore through their own aesthetic into a new soundworld.

tim is otm about strawberry jam! i love much of their previous output, but strawberry jam really does feel like the birth of a new animal collective to me, one that's continued through water curses as well (though "seal eyeing" is very feels-y)

I completely disagree with Tim

TS: Tim or Dominique?

i think it's correct to say that a synthesis of smoothing out is not necessarily directly opposed to a honed complexity. the latter seems to be a more articulate way of stating the former. smoothing out doesn't always equate to less radical. maybe it's just more cerebral (another loaded word).

maybe it's more cerebral intuitive.

great posts by both Tim and Dominique, it saddens me that I can't agree with both.

I dunno that I really hear any kind of striving for "progression" or refinement or the synthesis yr speaking of in any of their albums. Which is part of why everything they do still excites me like few others can. Even Strawberry Jam and Feels, both pretty tight and closed machines of albums (more so SJ) that don't really have any of the kind of uneasy joy found in the loose threads of Here Comes the Indian, say, still sound to me like the products of a band whose primary drive (or one of them) is to not get at all comfortable, always put themselves out there in basically unknown territory. Everything they've done has managed to thrill me in a completely different way than what came before.

My only hope for this album is that I haven't familiarised myself with the new songs too much and maybe lose some of the impact. The last three albums I had heard the songs before but avoided listening to them too much, and that worked out pretty well.

I still think Strawberry Jam sounds like Arcade Fire.

have you listened to either?

anyway tim and dominique's posts - classics or duds?

i, as usual, am very excited to hear this.

i've seen them three times since strawberry jam and i recognize a few of the titles from the live show. 'No More Runnin' and 'Daily Routine' should be highlights.

what a great band.

Da, enlightening posts by Tim and Dom both, and at various times I have gone back and forth between their positions. My question would be, how long did that Here Comes the Indian moment last? I certainly wouldn't put the first two records in with HCTI, not even close-- they touch on some of those elements, but with far less success IMO.

i've always felt the same way, mark (if I read your comment the right way). The first couple or so I think served (at least for me) as just a way for them to figure out what worked and what didnt. Sometimes the result was forgettable, other times it was beautiful. it wasnt until they became fully formed as a band (around HCTI that those sounds and ideas morphed into fully realized concepts, and most of us can agree the rest is history.

closing parenthesis after HCTI

the first three tracks on Hollindagin are even better, i think, at presenting the early rawness and loose threads balanced with the power of a fully formed band.

better than HCTI, I mean.

People are anti-Feels around here? I could see the Strawberry Jam hate since it was their big album, but I think Feels is not only their good middle point but when they really started to hit their stride. I really can't see much noize-luv around here either.

― skygreenleopard, Thursday, October 9, 2008 11:32 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

I was just reading through everything after my comment 5 days ago and realized I meant Sung Tongs, not Feels, as their turning point. Which isn't saying much or bringing anything new to the table, other than that I think it's my favorite AC album. I do, though, need to go back and revisit some old AC, Here Comes the Indians really is pretty good. A lot of what people are saying around here, especially Tim and Merdeyeax, make me want to go back and plays some of these albums again. And I do hope that new album has some good stuff on it. The tracklisting doesn't have that "walk around with you" song they played at their show last year - it was really good with the big show bass they had.

*Indian

can

i

just

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEh2dhkWiUA

looks like people are having fun but fucking groan

I don't even want to press play.

also via HRO iirc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO0f853ejAo

When will this end?

Define "this"

http://www.xlr8r.com/news/2010/06/cassettes-wont-listen-introduces

Cassettes Won't Listen Debuts Animal Ox (Animal Collective meets Cannibal Ox Remix) On XLR8R

(I haven't listened to it yet, but kind of worried I might like it if I did)

First The Grey Album, then Girl Talk, and now this.

Doesn't XLR8R cover electronic music all day? Why are they talking about plunderphonics/mashups in a way that would be condescending to an eighth grader?

spoiler: this is completely fucking unlistenable.

hold on

i am shocked

they should've done a mashup of cannibal ox and gr80 & i's MPP fake leak

i figured there was a parallel between El-P's flighty Moroder obsessions and AnCo's cinematic flutter that could be exploited, and plus I like both artists a bunch. But Cassettes Won't Listen just bungles simple shit like rhythm or key. Also there's pretty much NEVER been a good album-length "ARTIST MEETS ARTIST LOL" mash-up album in the history of time and that includes the suuuper spotty Grey Album

but what about the grey album

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_tie#Stereotypes_of_bow_tie_wearers

I like the Neon Indian album, but not enough to start a thread. So I'm just saying it here.

http://i52.tinypic.com/sys68o.gif

Josh "Deakin" Dibb, the somewhat-elusive fourth member of Animal Collective who sat out the recording and touring for 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, is back in the band.

http://pitchfork.com/news/40842-deakin-back-in-animal-collective/

shit

iGay

― iGay, Saturday, December 13, 2008 8:57 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/652-a-history-of-digital-album-leaks-1993-2015/

haha wow i never saw harvey's paper on this

oh man, I didn't realize that he was the "academic doofus" he was talking about there.

jesus, merriweather came out 6 years ago

I know! God!

Did ILM do a MPP pre-cover? I know we did Centipede HZ

no

I haven't felt the urge to listen to this record in aeons... although for some reason or other 'Also Frightened' appeared out of nowhere in my head the other day.

Raggett N (2012). Personal interview. 19 October 2011.

I tried to listen to it 21 times in a row last year, but only made it 6.