animal collective

no vinyl sorry, should have said CDs

I have water curses, prospect hummer, sung tongs, merriweather..etc

no worries, someone else might take you up on that though! still don't think I've heard Water Curses but boy do I hate Avey's "yelp" style vocals that pop up in the later work with distressing frequency

yeah, otm

strawberry jam seemed to avey taking over way more and making it his own roadshow. the panda songs were always the best IMO

*seemed to find

Feels reissued on vinyl today, unreleased live recording uploaded: 8/22/04 - Neumo's - Seattle, WA

wastered
did you see the words
kids on holiday
people
loch raven
banshee beat
the purple bottle

finally listened to "Painting With" and it's...kinda fun actually? I mean I get that this and Centipede don't feel special the way MPP did but they're still pretty neat, I feel like if a different band had recorded those records they would've been much better received

I recommend the live recordings they've released from the PW tour. I like the album but it honestly felt more like a justification to tour and put on that amazing show. The lack of transitions is what sinks the album for me- they're jumping off points. the whole sound palette of this record was really well suited to extended transitions and blending. the album is too discreet for me

DISCRETE

(sorry)

Saw the Sung Tongs show in LA and, aside from a few moments, really disliked it. I love the album but watching these two grown men sing infantile gibberish really hammered home how dumb the whole endeavor is. Made me appreciate the way they grew on later albums—Fuller, noisier, more complex. This show felt less like revisiting old material than regressing to a lesser state.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Thursday, August 2, 2018 4:09 PM (one year ago)

Idk, Avey Tare squealing "wheee!" in response to Noah's descending scale motif on Leaf House may be the smartest thing I've ever heard on a pop record, as well as the most playful.

It works on record. It did not work live.

Interesting. I don't totally love any of their albums, tbh. All have some elements I really like and others I find offputting. Well, to be fair, I haven't heard them all, and of the several i've heard, some are more familiar to me than others. A couple I keep meaning to spend more time with...

On Sung Tongs it's that preppy, collegiate vibe that repels. And maybe it's just a product of the 60's folk-pop reference points. But the infantile regression therapy stuff is actually what I find most appealing in it.

the first Sung Tongs show, in December 2017, was one of the best shows I've ever seen. some of the most powerful crowd energy ever- I understand what you're saying and I imagine that it lost some of the magic when the toured it, but goddamn, the energy in the room that night, the brilliant surprise of COVERED IN FROGS into Winter's Love, the transcendent Visiting Friends... it was an amazing night.

PB was also going wild vocally that night- it was a throwback to the original ST shows I've seen online from like 2003.

they were very good for about three years (2003-2006) but Merriweather Post Pavillion was horrible and established their later signature 'terrible' sound and now its been almost 15 years since they released anything decent. Sung tongs/feels/campfire songs were all great though.

Am in general agreement--Prospect Hummer also holds up well in the EP dept IMO

Strawberry Jam was the harbinger of the decline.

pom otm, much prefer MPP to Strawberry Jam. But MPP set the template for the unlistenably busy sound of what came after.

Sung Tongs and Feels are both painfully classic though

When they lost their initial sense of off-handed, accidental exploration and started camping on the Respectable Art of Timeless Songcraft, I couldn't help but feel like trawling for 9.0+ p4k scores had become their sole raison d'être (it worked, mind you).

Aka their earlier stuff really was better.

I saw them many times in the window plax mentioned. Those shows, most of which were built around the Feels songs, really were amazing. When that album eventually came out it was a huge disappointment, and I never really put my finger on why that was. All the chaos gone, perhaps

When they lost their initial sense of off-handed, accidental exploration and started camping on the Respectable Art of Timeless Songcraft, I couldn't help but feel like trawling for 9.0+ p4k scores had become their sole raison d'être (it worked, mind you).

― pomenitul, Tuesday, August 4, 2020 11:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

LOL not a chance

Agree with everything here. I quite liked 'Fireworks' but Strawberry Jam was unpleasant, and MPP only had about 2-3 good songs in a mire of bad production choices and over-precious lyrics. I will vouch very much for the concurrent 'What Would I Want, Sky' EP, which seemed to nail that direction a lot better and is just a nicer record overall.

cranking "brothersport" and imagining recent opinions as hipster runoff posts ca. 09

feels sounded like arcade fire is what happened

I got into them at the time of Strawberry Jam & Person Pitch, and I'm still generally fond of those records, as well as Sung Tongs and parts of Feels. Also I still regard MPP as a major achievement for them. Saw them at the Troubadour when they toured that album and it ranks among my favorite all-time concerts. Just thrilling.

That said... I've been ambivalent at best to anything they've done, as a group or solo, since then. And I saw Avey Tare and PB do the 10th anniversary tour for Sung Tongs a year or two back and found the whole thing really infantile. I probably posted about it upthread somewhere. And though I feel nostalgic for that album and SJ and MPP, I truly don't pull out any of their records with much regularity any more.

I actually liked Painting With quite a bit, it's not great but I probably listen to it more than MPP these days

fwiw I think "Lion in a Coma" is the high point of their career

Feels is great, all that crawling under the surface, like something on your skin

Wow, I love their dense psych stuff but I often skip Lion!

here's my MPP God Mode playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1V8PN4AHytamvJYvwoBXUR?si=LZvpjE44RDuvvpdQXJ7dDg

Basically cut out the more formless and cloying bits and replaced them with cuts from Fall Be Kind. I'd happily listen to this

Seriously though, listening to these songs in this order is so much more enjoyable to me:

Graze
Brothersport
What Would I Want Sky
On A Highway
Bluish
Lion In A Coma
I Think I Can
No More Runnin

short and sweet at 43 minutes but it opens and concludes nicely and no adobe slabs

for the late period haters (I'm not), don't sleep on ODDSAC

I have not listened to ODDSAC since seeing it in a theater but I recall enjoying! It led to a personal goal to visit the state park in PA where they filmed the scene with all the boulders. Finally achieved a few years later, psychedelically enhanced iirc

a couple things

1) maybe it's the herbal supplement but I've finally started to connect with these guys as "the music of childhood"...particularly there's something about the bass sounds they use, those clunky little Atari noises that for me really do seem to trigger memories of being like, 4 years old. its hard to explain but there's something about that sound that hits me in a weird place.

2) Painting With is a great little record, I think I like it more than any of 'em save for MPP and maybe Feels. I like that winky-wonky noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5iJ9wt4paY

New single... sounds great?! Finally some production with a bit of breathing room in it.

My guess is they have been chowing down heavy on The Dead.

Best thing I've heard out of them in years.

This is the step they needed to take.

Painting With was cluttered and exhausting

And most of the soundtrack side stuff they’ve done since then has been a shrug at best

This is good, I dig it. I really haven't enjoyed an AnCo release since MPP (I know, we are all supposed to hate that one) and haven't loved one unreservedly since Strawberry Jams. Looking forward to the new one now though.

(Not ALL of the side stuff has been bad but a lot of it had been just sorta there)

I'm not really sure why the ilx hivemind (unless it went beyond that somewhere) decided we are supposed to hate MPP. Seemed a lot like a predictable anti-hype backlash contrarian thing, but it's not like I asked around or anything. I personally don't have strong feelings about that album one way or another, except that I liked how it relatively wasn't so busy and frantic. To that point, this new track seems like a nice way to mature their sound! Cool development.

I don’t think MPP is inherently bad - whenever I come back to it (intentionally or when Apple Music shunts me to a track) it’s a thrill. At the time I was writing about it and had been heavily anticipating it and … just burnt myself out on it.

I'm probably the rare person here who loved Centipede Hz. I've probably posted about it somewhere, but never gotten any bites. I never really jumped onto the backlash wagon with them, but their music just resonated less with me over time. This new song is pretty cool, if not super distinct. My interest is piqued, though.

Painting With was cluttered and exhausting

― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, October 20, 2021 9:42 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea I wanna revise my opinion on this the album really does wear you out if you listen to it at once, same boing-boing-boing-boing rhythms and alternating vocals on every track. I do think the songs are mostly good though, especially the side openers.

Centipede Hz is the one I think that needs re-evaluation, I think a lot of people were suffering from AnCo burnout at the time and maybe didn't appreciate how freaky this album gets. it's quickly becoming a favorite

new song sounds quite nice. i think it would be cool if they did something less hyperactive w/o being all droney and weird

Good song except the simple repetitive melody

CHz has definitely grown on me over the years

new song is ok

mpp is good, just not the masterpiece it was hyped in the press as at the time. chz is ok, there's some good stuff on it but it's a little overwhelmingly dense & not as strong as what came before.

there are apparently two new albums on the way next year, not just time skiffs. story is they have a ton of new material but weren't happy with their attempts to record half of it remotely during the pandemic. they've been playing a lot more than just the time skiffs material live.

Wide Eyed from CHz is one of my favorite AnCo tracks ever, they should let Deak sing more

My favorite AC thing in the last while is actually the Deakin solo record

Deakin is back for this song.

New track is very pretty, love the Rhodes on it