animal collective

xps I found MPP to be patchy as fuck.

really? what songs didn't do it for you?

I found that starting with Strawberry Jam, AC decided to go further and further down this route of claustrophobic bit-crushed noise that buried everything in this really clumsy, unrefined way. The lyrics became self-parodic and as ufo alludes to upthread, they became another chillwavish band in a sea of other chillwavish bands. Tracks I would save from MPP include Bluish, Lion In a Coma, No More Runnin and Brothersport. The rest I can take or leave.

I think I still love or at least really like almost all the tracks on MPP, even years after binge listening to it.
for me, that album is upthere with the best pop albums ever, no less !

You know what? I really liked the Fall Be Kind EP that came out around that time. That's the last AC release I really loved.

Yes! Esp "What would I want"

yeah - i remember hearing it live before it came out and thinking it was one of the best things i'd heard by them.

stop daydreaming dude

yeah - i remember hearing it live before it came out and thinking it was one of the best things i'd heard by them.

Likewise! I saw them in Dublin in 2009 and they played it and I recorded the second half of it on my phone because it sounded great. When Fall Be Kind came out later that year I recognised it straight away.

Video is out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuoIvNFUY7I

well that's not a bad track at all. i quite like it. Nice and bouncy. The production is a bit more solid than I'd come to expect from them. and I like the Wipeout sample.

What Would I Want? Sky is probably my favorite AC-track as well. I prefer Fall Be Kind to MPP. And like SJ and CHz more as well. I just could never get into MPP. But when I heard them live after CHz, I have to admit My Girls and Brother Sport were awesome.

I agree that the Fall be Kind EP was great and somehow, managed to meet my high expectations following MPP.
It was like having my own psychedelic era Beatles releasing a classic pop album and following it up with a stand-alone single/EP. only it didn't go further...
I think I can is fantastic.

Already seems strange that these guys were the definition of the zeitgeist for a brief while.

yea it seems SUPER fucking weird tbh

crazy that MPP was 7 years ago !
god I'm old...

just as Nirvana inspired millions to play strats & DS-1's, the AC inspired thousands to use SP-303's and 404's

So the cover of fall be kind is so creepy. the shadow of an axe being swung overhead.

my fiance couldn't make it through Floridada haha

i felt like after panda bear released person pitch, they could have gone a number of different ways with mpp. some of the early live versions of mpp were sicker than what ended up on record. i think they've been thinking about music for a live festival crowd since then. which is fine, i think fall be kind could be sort of a blueprint going forward for them, what would i want? in particular seems like it would sound good live in a big setting

dog latin otm mpp sux0r

The FloriDada video is disgusting.

So the cover of fall be kind is so creepy. the shadow of an axe being swung overhead.

― calstars, Friday, January 8, 2016 11:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa, never noticed that before! nice catch...

word is that Flo Rida is going to be on the FloriDada remix

surprised the PFFR video isn't more offensive. maybe they asked them to tone it down

what else have they done?

woa they did it? i need to check it out.

they did Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel

oh shit i've seen some of that Xavier: Renegade Angel show

yeah it hits the same acid techno mysticism vibe of the ac

So the cover of fall be kind is so creepy. the shadow of an axe being swung overhead.

― calstars, Friday, January 8, 2016 11:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa, never noticed that before! nice catch...

Me neither but to me it's someone chopping wood (fall and winter be kind !) so not really sinister !

I guess I've seen the shining too many times

i felt like after panda bear released person pitch, they could have gone a number of different ways with mpp.

What's funny is that Person Pitch became a founding document for chillwave, but Panda Bear essentially abandoned that sound and went off in a different direction. The thing about that sound is how easy it is - you grab a little one or two chord sample from (preferably an old) song, roll off the bass, and drown it in reverb. Optionally add other samples in the same key (or pitchshift to match). Maybe find a choir sample you can loop. Then improvise your own melodies over the (largely static) harmonic backdrop.

I did a tune the ILX pre-covers Centipede Hz, and the second half of it is me doing the above to take the piss out of how easy it is. Easy isn't the same thing as bad, and I think Person Pitch is a great album that still holds up today. There was a ton of lazy chillwave stuff released that ran the formula into the ground though.

His subsequent solo stuff is put together differently - more synths, fewer samples, and a lot more chords (Ponytail has the most chords of any song on PP and it only has 3). I think this is important because the more chords there are and the quicker the changes, the harder it is to be melodic (see: bebop before modal and hard bop stripped things back) and I think his last two albums suffer a little bit from this.

Another thing from the Pitchfork interview:

The thing about Centipede Hz that also made the recording difficult was how we wrote it for the stage and, before recording, we did a handful of tours where we each had different monitor mixes onstage. So some of us got set ideas about what songs should sound like and where certain parts should fit in. Then, when we went to ooze all four of those different perspectives together—there weren’t battles, but it did lead to a lot of things staying in the mix.

Well there's your problem right there.

The thing about that sound is how easy it is - you grab a little one or two chord sample from (preferably an old) song, roll off the bass, and drown it in reverb. Optionally add other samples in the same key (or pitchshift to match). Maybe find a choir sample you can loop. Then improvise your own melodies over the (largely static) harmonic backdrop.

This has always been my problem with PP and chill wave in general. I found PP to be kind of unexciting and easily-executed. Chillwav-ish music drives me nuts because it feels like the musicians/producers are somehow so embarrassed by their own music, they have to bury it under mounds of messy reverb. I don't find it transportive, just frustrating and artless.

probably why i still think acoustic-era AC is the most interesting because the ideas are stripped bare and not covered in lacquers of plugins.

I'm so happy a song with the title "Bagels in Kiev" is as good as it suggests

Pitchfork calling time on their relevance to the Pitchfork project:

"Now, they're parents living in different zip codes and riding the festival circuit... Times change, life intervenes. Painting With was the first time the band jumped right into the studio. Work can be scheduled, magic can't."

Oh, the myth of the romantic artist, pulling magic from the air almost by accident. Pure bullshit.

?

"Work can be scheduled, magic can't" - it's horseshit and it's not an idea that people in any other creative sphere that I've interacted with give any credence to. It's not an idea that a lot of musicians give any credence to - Bowie recorded Blackstar in sessions that were strictly timetabled, 10am to 4pm each day or whatever, presumably so he could fit it around family life - but some aspects of indie (and classic rock, to be fair) culture still have this frankly Randian idea that artists are special spectral snowflakes who just act as aerials for cosmic rays of inspiration. And it's nonsense.

It's certainly a romantic idea. I think there is room for both approaches.

"Work can be scheduled, magic can't" - it's horseshit and it's not an idea that people in any other creative sphere that I've interacted with give any credence to. It's not an idea that a lot of musicians give any credence to - Bowie recorded Blackstar in sessions that were strictly timetabled, 10am to 4pm each day or whatever, presumably so he could fit it around family life - but some aspects of indie (and classic rock, to be fair) culture still have this frankly Randian idea that artists are special spectral snowflakes who just act as aerials for cosmic rays of inspiration. And it's nonsense.

― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 16 February 2016 12:38 (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure I agree at all. How is the idea that creativity can't be turned on and off like a tap 'Randian'? How does it not fluctuate from person to person?

Creativity doesn't come from cosmic rays, no, but if you work as a collective (unlike Bowie who is a bit of a high watermark for comparisons and also a solo artist with full auteurist control on his work), you are influenced and inspired by each other, and the place where you are, and the environment around you, and the tools you have to hand, and how often you get to meet up, and how tired you are, and what you saw on TV last night etc etc...

I'm pretty sure Bowie was writing and coming up with ideas outside of the allocated times you mention. Nobody sits there and goes 'right, brain, give me ideas!' - it doesn't work like that at all.

I'll give you a musician who would give credence to the idea - David Byrne, who in the first page of his book 'How Music Works' challenges the idea that songwriters sit at a desk until a mad look comes over them and they start scribbling-down notes on a page.

References to kimchi aside, I don't really have much of a problem with the Pitchfork write-up. It's pretty much a summation of how I feel about 'Painting With...'.
'Animal Collective - The Ride' is OTM.

Maybe Bowie is able to write amazing music in his sleep, but even he's had some low creative points. Dare I say it, I don't even rate Blackstar all that highly myself, but it's a matter of taste. The writer of that review is saying that because AC now live in different pockets of the world and have many other commitments than they used to, their sound is starting to ossify. Their best work came from collaboration and having a lot of time to just jam around and play with ideas and not really having to worry about delivering a finished product every couple of years. This is very different from booking studio time and saying 'right, let's make an album', which might suit some artists down to a T, but in my mind isn't really suited to these guys.

Well I have problems with auteur theory too.

what is auteur theory when applied to music written and played by the same people?

I haven't heard the album but this is some real BS

Old heads will tell you that the most exciting part of seeing them live was hearing songs months, sometimes years before they came out on record: I, for example, remember being in the basement of a sushi restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, watching Sung Tongs before anyone knew it existed, or wading through Webster Hall to a gorgeous, slowly dawning song they later called "Banshee Beat." The feeling of that moment is hard to describe, but it was something like standing in the light of a secret.

I was there, man!!

They're Pitchforking hard in that write-up, but I'm sad to say it's not wrong

I didn't read that as a 'special snowflakes' comment - my take was:

a) Making music that relies on a certain amount of face-to-face jamming and serendipity is harder when the members are scattered around the world. Geologist is in DC, Panda Bear is in Lisbon, and I think Avey Tare is in LA. That's 8 hours worth of time zones. Working on stuff piecemeal like an oil painting and sending each other FLACs doesn't work for everyone.
b) Your free time declines dramatically as you get older and accrue commitments have a family and in some cases help take care of sick parents etc, even if they are lucky fuckers with no day jobs.
c) Maybe Animal Collective has run its course - I don't think they'll either do anything drastically different to what they've done before, or make another MPP, and the zeitgeist's moved on for now anyway.

Maybe Bowie is able to write amazing music in his sleep, but even he's had some low creative points. Dare I say it, I don't even rate Blackstar all that highly myself, but it's a matter of taste. The writer of that review is saying that because AC now live in different pockets of the world and have many other commitments than they used to, their sound is starting to ossify. Their best work came from collaboration and having a lot of time to just jam around and play with ideas and not really having to worry about delivering a finished product every couple of years. This is very different from booking studio time and saying 'right, let's make an album', which might suit some artists down to a T, but in my mind isn't really suited to these guys.

Oops, missed this before I posted but I agree.

I was there, man!!

― frogbs, Tuesday, 16 February 2016 14:03

Or maybe not

Correction (2/16/16 2:04 p.m.): This review previously described hearing the album Sung Tongs at a concert in Charlottesville. The album in question is Feels

Oddly enough for me this is the best thing since mpp

everyonesome people wake up at dawn and write until lunch every day, other people take a bunch of amphetamines and write for 4 days straight while their wife and children move out in the background.