Sometimes the best picture of the year isn’t released during the Autumn Oscar-bait season. Case in point: Road House. And sometimes the best album of the year is released only a few weeks after the ball drops in January. 2009 A.D. was one of those times. Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective has rightly been hailed as a masterpiece and an American classic. I hate using that kind of hyperbole, but the artistry at work in this record is staggering. And while many albums that craft unforgettable sounds and melodies tend to get dragged down by their own self-satisfied, pretentious lyrics, Animal Collective’s latest offering is full of wonder, humility, and affirmations of universal ideas that, if uttered by conservatives, are normally Scarlet Letters of squareness.
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The problem with most “experimental” music is that there’s a fair degree of laziness in the experiments. Most bands attempting to create novel sonic concoctions end up in two camps: those playing with new technology without having first come up with a coherent idea (i.e., one drum loop repeated for ten minutes with all sorts of craaaaazy twists of the reverb knob) and those who think that recording typical acoustic singer/songwriter dreck with a broken microphone pointed into a corner is “experimental.” The former ends up with nothing but noise; the latter ends up with an extensive collection of name tags and hair nets. Even from its inception, Animal Collective’s work was very noisy, often consisting of chaotic acoustic guitar riffs and off-key chanting. Though for those who were patient, there were affecting melodies and a kind of primal musicality buried under these noise experiments.
With Merriweather Post Pavilion, AC has brought perfect harmony to their tension between noise and music. Opening track “In the Flowers” starts off muted and mysterious, with singer Avey Tare watching a woman dancing in a field, high and free of inhibition. He is singing about his wife–missing her as he constantly travels, wanting nothing more than to ditch his own skin to be with her. The sounds of crickets creep into the mix as he wistfully murmurs, “If I could just leave my body for a night,” and the song explodes into a galloping beat. You hear the cricket song placed at the top of the mix–blaring, beautiful, and dangerous–as though experiencing it through the mind of a lightning bug flying through a swarm of its blazing peers. It’s an exhilarating, perfectly paced opener, a fitting introduction to the hazy, dense, and layered instrumentation you have the pleasure of hearing for the next 45 minutes.
Every listener will find favorites from each of the eleven anthemic tracks on the album, each one a cornucopia of surprising and awe-inspiring sounds and melodies. The one I connect with most is the first single “My Girls,” wherein the band’s other singer, Panda Bear, joyfully cries out lyrics that hit close to home during the current recession:
I don’t need
To seem like I care about material things
Like social status
I just want
Four walls and adobe slabs for my girls
The sublime harmony, cascading synth arpeggios, and swinging dance beat suggest the loosing of a heavy burden, trading self-interest for a noble life of hard work and familial love. It’s just one of many songs that affirm the greatness of wholesome devotion: “Bluish” revels in how special it is to have exclusive, monogamous sex; “Daily Routine” finds beauty in pushing around one’s daughter in a stroller; “Guys Eyes” treads where only puritanical Christians would, admitting that you just might be letting down your wife/girlfriend by jerking off to porn instead of making love to her. These lyrics are the work of real men facing their age and responsibilities with maturity and eagerness, not poseur bohemians convinced of their own greatness.
By no means am I suggesting that AC is a conservative band; recently they’ve been shilling for PETA, and they’ve always been forthcoming about their drug use. But between overproduced, lifeless pop and country artists, incestuously derivative emo rock, and indie bands for which I have no more synonyms for “self-important douchenozzles,” Animal Collective displays the kind of excellence gained through hard work and modesty that we should all support.
What’s even more astounding is how consistent and prolific AC has been. Last December’s EP Fall Be Kind saw them expanding their canon even further with such revelatory songs as “Graze” and “What Would I Want? Sky,” featuring samples from ’70s pan flute virtuosos and the Grateful Dead. Also worth checking out from 2009 were their astounding remixes of Ratatat, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Phoenix.
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