Our Pet Sounds…

 

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

 

In an age where progression is everything, where technology encourages us to squander our lives away, where possibilities and impossibilities are tormented equals, where we exist in the interconnected dream, there are fewer sounds as magical and adventurous as the sounds Animal Collective have produced within this milestone pop record, it truly is the Pet Sounds of our generation and most probably one of the most important pop records of the last 20 years. Neo-psychedelia never sounded so crystallised, puerile and relentlessly spell-binding.  Previous to this record Animal Collective had always been an experimental group of recording artists, constantly adopting a different ethos with approach to recording every new record. Their previous records contained rawer, unfiltered, avant-garde qualities. Which ultimately lead the band to gain a reputation with followers of the new weird America movement. No one really knew where they’d go next, having already experimented with freak folk, electronica, noise pop and art rock. Up until this point their sound always seemed more live oriented, however, with this record the band go head first in the opposite direction, maximising their capabilities by experimenting with PA speakers, heavy sampling, rich melodies and painstaking production. You can see that their song craft seems more rounded than before and that they've adopted a richer pop sensibility. The album is very much like a journey, we all know what those listens are like right? Those records that is to be experienced from beginning to end, leading you to cheery, graceful, welcoming and sometimes melancholy territory. On first listen the album’s introduction track’ In The Flowers’ is like walking down a spiral staircase backwards all the while with your mind glowing, calming sounds that then explode into layers on layers of synthesized sound, soaring vocal melodies and cleverly placed percussion accending to a crescendo. It then melts into probably the group’s most popular single to date ‘My Girls’ a song in which Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) expresses his love for his wife and daughter but in the same instance shares his confusion on fitting in both socially in the 21^st century; “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, like a social status, I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls”. The child-like avid collector sings along with a new age bubble-gum sound, hooks like these leave you humming to yourself.  The next track ‘Also Frightened’ enters with an infectious bass-line, effects heavy samples, that pan, enter and disappear, a perfect soundtrack to the hallucinogenic suburban dream. The next track ‘Summertime Clothes’ was the band’s second single from this record and probably the most pop-orientated song on the record. A song about floating high and getting wasted with your friends, on a hot summer night.  The next song ‘Daily Routine’ starts off with a slowed sequence of notes, as if being processed from a moog then sped up, Panda Bear vocalises and then the song breaks down into a most mesmerising segment. The next song ‘Bluish’ is a lucid gem, maybe their most romantic offering yet “Put on the clothes that I like, It makes me so crazy though I can't say why, keep on your stockings for a while, some kind of magic in the way you're lying there”  the song’s airy current, and slow-dance atmosphere only adds to the romantic prose. With this album the songs complement one another, with each different track, there are different musical influences and somehow the band manages to form perfect soundscapes that light up forgotten imagination. Animal Collective establishes themselves as pioneers of pop-melody, the forefront of experimental art rock and pop. I believe this record will be listened to for years to come, because of its original song craft and its timeless fresh take on pop-electronica in contemporary music today.

 

Ryan’s recommended tracks:

‘Also Frightened’

'My Girls'

‘Daily Routine’
‘Bluish’
‘Guys Eyes’

‘Taste’

'Bloodsport'