Animal Collective – "My Girls", "Summertime Clothes", and "Bluish" + Thoughts on the Album

I don’t sit down with the intention of doing posts longer than a paragraph very often, but I’ve got a couple things on my mind. 1) I don’t enjoy writing structured reviews. 2) The new Animal Collective Album is great.

1) I’ve written a good amount of reviews in my lifetime. I’ve written for other music websites in the past, and it’s just not fun for me. I don’t like worrying about format. I don’t like worrying about having to come up with another sentence because a paragraph is too short. What’s cool about P&P is that I can say whatever the fuck I want, and however the fuck I want to say it. Ha, I sound like a brat. What I mean is I feel like the Lil’ Wayne of bloggers right now. Not in that I think I’m the greatest (!!!), but usually when I sit down to share something, I just want to get it out there and say what comes to my mind. That stream of consciousness shit. That incomplete sentences shit.

Some days I feel like throwing a number rating on everything I hear. Some days I think judging another persons art and assigning a numeric value to it should be a crime. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll get professional with this, but for now it’s really nice to just be able to speak freely about music. It also saves me from a lot of pacing.

2) Animal Collective’s new album Merriweather Post Pavilion is great. I don’t need to go into detail about this, because the album has enough hype as it is but this news is a little different coming from me because I never liked Animal Collective. Panda Bear annoys me and I have always thought they buried really good songs beneath a bunch of bullshit for the sake of sounding weird.

On Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective still has all the “bullshit”. All the crazy sonic noises, all the echoes, all the blips, ticks, chks, clrks, fths, tchks and drips. But the songs underneath the sounds are full of so much melody and, for lack of a better word, catchiness, that Animal Collective has found the perfect balance between accessibility and experimentation. Instead of being buried, the music is able to lift it’s head. These songs are alive. They have heartbeats. They breathe, move, and speak. Listening to this album for the first time is like unzipping your skull and letting every color, feeling, and taste around you soak into your brain. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but give it a chance. It’s like the Beach Boys on acid. Check out a few tracks. I’m sure this album will take a while to completely saturate my brain, but on first listen these are the 3 that stood out.

Animal Collective – My Girls
Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes
Animal Collective – Bluish