Rockin' Our Turntable: Animal Collective
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 7, 2009 4:40PM
The rain of praise tumbling down upon Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion has been so grossly effusive it borders upon caricature. One would be forgiven for hating the band outright based on the over-the-top praise already being heaped on the disc, available only on vinyl until January 20. However, do not believe the hype.
Here are the facts: although Animal Collective is nine albums into their career and no one really cared about them until a few years ago when music blogs had just about mined the heck out of all available indie bands to tout. Figuring that Animal Collective's impenetrable musical pastiches must equal greatness, they were held forward as the next great hope for music. We've never really minded their endless loops and sound collages, but we never really cared about them either. Until the set they played last year at Pitchfork music Festival we honestly did not "get" them at all ... but we can now say with great confidence that they are a group for whom the live experience is what it's all about, which is to say they are basically an indie rock Phish. (Don't get us wrong, we think Phish actually produced some fine music here and there, and don't mean this comparison as an insult.)
After that show it became rather apartment to us that it was time for the band to finally put down on record what had been drawing fans in onstage. The music blogs were going to need a "hit" to support their views of the band, and when we heard tracks leaked off Merriweather Post Pavilion we began to think that the group might finally deliver a crossover album to haul in even the most doubtful music fans.
It is not the album of the year, but it may still be the album that broadens their base beyond people who preview promo copies of the band's work gratis. The music is still marked by the same fearless attitude towards building songs of base repetition, but this time the compositions occasionally reach outward instead of nesting in the inner world of the collective cranium. The opening and closing tracks, "In The Flowers" and "Brother Sport" respectively, soar and blossom into shining beacons simultaneously beckoning inward and outward. In fact, they nearly blind with their optimism and exuberant mission statements. Neither height is matched in the music between those two imposing slabs, but where previous offering meandered and squandered much of their emotional promise, the meat of Merriweather Post Pavilion seems to understand that the band must meet their audience half way; they can no longer retreat to the back of the studio with their backs to us. Instead, they make attempts to draw us in.
This is what marks this album separate from the rest of the band's catalog. It's almost as if the members of Animal Collective suddenly realized so many writers were counting on them to prove various predictions of greatness true, so the band went into the studio and built an album with the world outside for once. That doesn't make Merriweather Post Pavilion the best album of 2009, but it does make it the best offering of Animal Collective's career.