Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavillion. Web sheriff on the prowl. Are there any Animal Collective sorts that have not downloaded this album? Unlikely. The empty heads on I Love Music have been having quite an existential crisis with themselves and their insecurities. Early consensus seemed to favor a backlash was groupthink certified, a cooler than thou attitude, a 'who needs Animal Collective when we've got Prussia' attitude. It was remarkable and shallow. Here then was this amazing little, fluffy little, pretty little record and they couldn't dare admit to enjoying it or else risk fearsome ridicule fromt he clearasil brigade. Pitchfork approved. But later came people willing to express their own opinion for their own purposes based on how they felt when the record played. Such simpletons. We know. I had a brief serious phase. Did I ever believe what I listened to was important though? Unknown. I wrote letters to Peter Jefferies lamenting over the silliness of Stereolab. I made mix tapes of the Dead C (gasp!) for trade. I wrote record reviews as I believed a real record reviewer might. I gave a positive review to a Trampoline record. Oh wait...or oh dear! First song is reminiscent of all of the other songs on the album, electronic, vague, looping, loads of vocal harmonies, pretty vocals, no squeals, lovely. It's rather athletic. Every Animal Collective record is fit. There has been discussion of this being comparable to Brian Wilson. Nonsense. These aren't brilliant songs, hardly. It's a brilliant record based on the feral energy exhibited and the impressionistic dreaminess of the whole. Second song now, a Panda Bear song, and it sounds very Panda Pitch but with the lethargy extinguished in favor of the fevered pace of Animal Collective. The voices are pitched well forward, featured, multi-tracked, echoey and dreamy. They sing. They do. It's odd. A repeating sample in the background, the voice enmeshed in a crinkled electronic fabric. There are still elements of the heartbeat percussion that thrill my own heart so. The bass thump to convulse my soul, physical reaction, I am moved to spasmodic interlopings and meandering thoughts. There is nothing about any of this to focus the mind. The Ruby Suns finished in 635th place on the Pazz and Jop poll just slightly ahead of Cloetta Paris record. I don't think the Animal Collective learned anything from that Ruby Suns record though they ought to have. It's a brilliant record and if thee are 634 records that are better from 2008 then I would like to hear them. I was meant to write about a New Zealand record but all of a sudden everyone is on and on about New Zealand. That was my thing, it has been taken away, even Nocturnal Projections has been given the indiepop thumbs up, strange. Animal Collective informed the Ruby Suns, positively, they informed Architecture in Helsinki into making one of the worst albums of all time. Well done. Is anyone interested in a Jay Clarkson entry? Not likely. Perhaps a bit about This Kind of Punishment but then I'd be following in the colossal wake of ************. I am very rude. Graeme Jefferies was handsome in his youth, he filled out those leather pants smartly once upon a time. Some have been complaining about Panda Pitch's backing vocals while praising the Knife. Madness. These are songwriters? Are they. Loops and samples and meaningless trifles. It's magnificent. But I don't imagine there will be black and white photographs of them 30 years hence in some retrospective exhibition on New York hipster rock where they are hunched ovr a Steinway Grand, cigarette in hand, hair tussled just so, scratched out etchings of a popular life shuffled all about the floor in front of them. Not probably. Maybe a black and white photo of one of them drinking a yoo hoo. Are they drug heads? The music is by turns mostly wholesome and vitamin enriched. I have involuntary movements guided by the god of animals while I listen. The prowl of a leopard crawls down my forearms, the call of the howler monkey, the slithering of an asp in my smallest toe, all these literary turns from monoglots. Records should be listened to out of doors, in darkness and sunshine, in isolation and in groups, with hearts open and hair turned down. I could write lyrics like Avey Tare. This is a Panda Pitch song. All of the songs are rather long. I don't mind. It's the opposite of the Pas/Cal record, with the enduring length the energy level seems to cascade each moment upon the next needed to build crescendo upon crescendo, even as things are mostly unchanging and unflinchingly bright. Uniformity. Next song. Also Frightened. Very Panda Pitch again. I am seemingly obsessed over the failure of the Pas/Cal record. I haven't any idea why but I can not simply let it go. I was invested deeply, emotional interest was denied. I'd claim it similar to a relationship with a significant other but I've only taken part in those antebellum never while I was actually ever involved with someone the power of regret and nostalgia holds sway. Animal Collective are clever but I don't know if they imagine themselves more clever than average. They seem yeoman and workmanlike in their particular ethic. An album-a-year plus side projects. It's more of a job than an enterprise. I think Pas/Cal were attempting greatness, bombast, splendid tricks of the mind and they became all too aware of their 'cleverness'. Arguments were removed from those that ought to be had with the real world and became entirely internalized. Or something else happened on the way to the record's release. Who knows. As said by others, a great deal of this record has a uniformitarianism. There is a central theme and Warren Ellis from the Dirty Three says it is corny cheerfulness. Unrelenting cheerfulness. Whatever. I've never heard anything by the Dirty Three but to auger a case in the affirmative for being cheerful and bright is quite curmudgeonly. "You know I'd be into the Beach Boys if they hadn't been so keen on singing about the beach", I suppose he might have preferred some sort of bubblegum Goth record where they had a cheerfulness only for maudlin pursuits that the Dirty Three could champion. As I've never heard a Dirty Three record I am not sure what causes they would celebrate. But there are the albums which we wish we made versus the ones that are actually made, i.e. My Heart Was Razed by Matthew, Mark, Luke and Laura. Next song. Summertime Clothes, exceedingly cheerful, indeed. This is an Avey Tare song. He has undergone a transformation on this record. Pop music wunderkind. It is still somewhat frustrating in that it is frustratingly vague. When the Beach Boys sing In my Room it is simple, plaintive, direct, catholic. I suppose there lies the root of the problem of communication in today's world of which indie rawk is only a microcosm. The ironic detachment is enabled by the assortment of symbolic gestures available in lieu of human emotion that could be honestly declared. Instead of composing a sonnet or poem on the back of a bazooka joe wrapper you make a mix tape, mix cd or mix USB stick?!? You could write a poem on the side of a zip drive. It is not out of the realm of possibility. But a futile gesture as it would probably be a Steven Malkmus quote that didn't make any sense when Malkmus uttered it and less so as a profession of undying devotion. I don't make many mix cd's any more. I made one recently with the same motivation as I had had in the past and it was a bust. But for the most part it's an exercise to mark myself as a curiosity to people who surround me with a uniform sense of the mainstream. I do wonder about the internal workings of people that exist about me. I have lucid daydreams, lucid enough to have caused me to seek out a medical professional because they seemed almost wholly involuntary when they would arise while I was walking in Cherry Creek state park and the flashes of buffalo and gibbons and bats filled the horizon charging straight for me isolated on the plain. I have that unworked pet theory over the popularity of cellular communication relating to the idea that people's inner landscapes are barren and void and so they are compelled to fill it with gossip over people whose electrical storms bubble to the surface by more interesting means than their wardrobe. When I make mix cd's the Animal Collective song I select is usually, well recently, Reverend Green because I am attempting to amplify the stereotypes that surround me. I am alone for a reason. Fifth song playing now. Daily Routine, similar to the loping, slow songs that dominate the record but it's mesmerising in its cathedral soundscape production with absolutely no investment required of the listener at all. It is all surface. It's beguiling and otherworldly but hermetically sealed as if requiring a decoder ring from the bottom of a box of cheerios to decipher any greater theme or unity. It's a bit like the Dead C that I rant against over and over in that it is purposeless and vague but it has a pleasing quality that forbids condemnation. Really. Bluish now. If then the Beach Boys are the equivalent to an afternoon basking in sunlight then this might be the aural equivalent of a long car ride on the intemperate, sunny side, dust mote infected realm of the back seat of a Chevrolet Caprice. It is warm, it's bright, but it has a different quality due to the refracting properties of the tempered glass. Sunlight through a window is less life affirming and stimulating but it's still a mood altering substance and so here when injected into pop song we receive odd choruses that remind of 70s AOR radio. And now a falsetto that feels almost tropical, a bit of Bressa Creeting Cake Palm Singing, perhaps. All it lacks are steel drums and a pina colada. I rather like this. The entire album sigh, but this song in particular. Already 2009 has seen a myriad of fantastic releases with this, Pains of being Pure at Heart, Beirut, Emmy the Great, Burning Hearts, etc... Soon a Cats on Fire record! it could also borrow slightly from Mercury Rev's A Kiss From an Old Flame, it's sedate, it's a breakthrough for Animal Collective, easy listening afternoon slow jam. I used to work in a nursing home and there the sunlight there was a devious plot. A nursing home is a prison and the sunlight a tease. At lunch we would sometimes herd the residents out into the sunshine as a faint bit of torment to remind them of past glories and coalesce an exegesis of the pity over their withered existence. Is it worthwhile to live to a ripe age in such a state. I don't know. Could you desire death placidly? In the same home there were young that were infirmed from closed head injuries, the sunlight made no impression at all. The controversial ideas of social justice will surely be addressed with the preposterous arrival soon of socialized health care and it might be time for ugly sentiments to be brought forward into the sterilizing sunlight. Next song. A basic one, charmed, chanted mantra chorus, a repeating piano riff, it is very Mercury Rev, this entire album, but it lacks the comic disney sci-fi imprimatur. They have wisely avoided Dave Fridman thus far. I can picture him picketing meekly in front of Avey Tare's fashionable loft residence, sending them candygrams with a note advertising his services for some extortionate fee, sending along a testimonial by bicycle courier from Emma Pollock to plead his case. Will Avey Tare's wife bring her entire family over from Iceland now that I could buy the entire country with a halls cough drop and a pocketful of lint? They could have all of Mum, twins and all, under the same roof making the much needed Animal Collective/Mum split 10 inch, backwards. Next song. Taste, the shortest song on the album. Similar to the previous song. Electronic squiggles. heartbeat percussion has been replaced as a metronomic device by rote repetition, the vocals here are sly and soft, muscly backing vocals tower above in an aether surrounding the entire record. They turn the tap and delicious harmonies flow free. Marv lous. I could listen to the lyrics but I can not type and listen at the same time. It is why I am not a real music critic. I haven't any interest in examining the lyrics. None at all. I don't have a press kit in front of me to regurgitate incorrect information incorrectly and then construct that devastating six sentence synopsis to distill an album in the reflected heroism of prolificness. I am a coward, look at how long this entry has become. There is possibly a new Brunettes record this year as well. I listened to their last recently, it is in on the Pas/Cal levels of oblivion in this household. Why the need to be taken seriously? Who is it that we are trying to impress? Do I long to be recognized by Chuck Eddy as the voice of my generation? Hardly. There isn't any one that takes Rolling Stone or Spin seriously not with their name written on the outside of their undergarments editorial meetings and really what is the point of internet blogs and magazines? I condemn myself as passionately as you might really. I have approximately 1 regular reader. Not one single person is concerned over my opinion over the Animal Collective record and neither am I, I am just sense mining for a memorable phrase or two in my subconscious that is possibly elicited from the pleats of my cortex by the music within. Lion in A Coma, a punny Lucksmith'n title, this. Some heartbeat rhythm on this, muted, the vocals take point. There has been some focus on the electronics and it is mostly electronic but it's elementary. i could program this. All I would require is one of those Radio Shack electronic kits where you could build a telegraph/W.O.P.R. game in your spare time. I had an electronics course in high school. It was current to about 1973. It was almost 20 years out of date when I was touching my first capacitor and resistor and teasing out the realities of ohm's law. This is beautiful. It is music for pridefest. I reminisced with someone over their most embarrassing moment ever having been arriving late in torn jeans after an incident wth a water spigot at the pridefest. I can't categorize my most embarrassing moment as easily. Or, actually, I could. There was someone with a pair of knee high stockings, across the room, a vision, there was a community television with the television tuned to Days of Our Lives and I sat next to the person with knee high stockings, utterly paralyzed from the hair down with my oily skin and striped turtlenck giving off some odor toxic to human intervention. I was dead. But afterwards there was Blur's She's so High. my own symbolic gesture and triumph. Was that vague enough? It caused terrors even while typing it. This may be the weakest track No More Runnin', steel drum approximating samples, a pedestrian pace, blah blah blahs enough to make my mind drift to knee high stockings and bean burritos. Later I dated the person who killed me. So my embarrassment turned to revanchement against the fates, say it as 'em-bar-is-ment' rather than 'em-bear-is-ment' it sounds as easy on the ear as 'clee-on-tell' instead of 'cleye-in-tell'. Water. This song is a bit of a drag actually. It could represent the come down before the big finish. Over. Next is Borthersport another Panda Pitch song. Whoo. It is loads of voices, it's constructed from a repeating set of phrases, it's frightfully frantic and exciting, my involuntary muscle contractions have started to affect my typing again, I'm watching the pattern of my typing and it seems as if all of the patterns are circular and rhtymic in design. Now the verse, thrilling, can barely make out a melody, it's primal and fierce. It's just like how the old Animal Collective used to whinny, whew, at least the Pitchfork hatin' Battles loving kids have this song to keep them warm in the evening. Bless.