Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

Nah Bluish

I have cooled on this album a LOT tho

...actually, I think I ended up voting for Also Frightened which is a close.second

...actially, I want to hear Also Frightened right now so maybe thats the best

I listened to In the Flowers in the car this morning. It's a good opener.

the ac had such a fucking classic run pretty much from their inception up to merriweather. every subsequent record was surprising and amazing in its own right. it was really like they could do no wrong. could merriweather be their scary monsters? eeeeeep :x

Couldn't disagree more. The band was always trying out weird stuff, which they should be commended for, but they made a lot of duds. Danse Manatee and Campfire Songs are the worst, but there is a lot of uninspired music on their albums, or stuff that is hampered by bad mastering or sequencing or stuff like that. Plus, Centipede HZ is their third-best album, after Here Comes the Indian and Strawberry Jam.

these days I would vote No More Runnin tbh

i don't know man. name some duds, what's mastered poorly, what's sequenced wrong?

Well, pretty much everything is mastered poorly? Sung Tongs is killed by the sequencing, in my opinion. College is such an anti-climax after twelve minutes of Visiting Friends, and the last three songs are way too samey. Feels also tapers off after such an energetic start. MPP is also a lot of great tracks that never coalesces into more than it's parts.

Agree that Bluish is by far the best on MPP, which really isn't a good album by any stretch of my imagination. Sung Tongs, prospect hummer and Campfire songs were their classic period.

This fucking song.

I hate a lot of songs, but few actually make my physically queasy. This one does.

how do y'all feel about this? (fwiw from the tour they debuted my girls and many of the songs on MPP, arrangement and instruments used are very close to my girls)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v71PA3l0SeY

It's just annoying that 'My Girls' is considered the benchmark AC song. They just got more and more cloying and irritating as they went on didn't they?

did we ever work out what 'adobe slabs' were?

Why The Worst Lyric On “Merriweather Post Pavilion” Is Resonating With Everyone

xpost:

Adobe slats is what it is: slats that are made out of adobe.

Alfred OTM, though.

I would vote for that approx. 1 minute interlude between Guy's Eyes and Taste.

That horrible wedding video that went viral certainly didn't help.

it's weird how much i ended up avoiding this band....i had sung tongs on CD and it was pretty decent danielson famile type eccentric xian summer camp goofy psych bongo stuff but never heard much later

As thin as gruel and as uplifting as an elevator to the second floor

this is funny but v true

i remember when this album came out and this song came out. the next day i was in a club and this song started and ppl were like "oh shit here we go!" but what followed was a minute or so of forced dancing then everyone walking away until they put on Bowie or Prince or whathaveyou. it was dancefloor killer.

Adobe is one of the more basic substances used to build houses and has been around for thousands of years, so it seems like what's going on inside the house is more important thn its actual appearance. the one line of note I find interesting is that they refer to their social status as a "material thing." maybe that classification ...

As thin as gruel and as uplifting as an elevator to the second floor

this is funny but v true

i remember when this album came out and this song came out. the next day i was in a club and this song started and ppl were like "oh shit here we go!" but what followed was a minute or so of forced dancing then everyone walking away until they put on Bowie or Prince or whathaveyou. it was dancefloor killer.

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, May 3, 2018 9:50 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not a dance song. go to better clubs

oh i stopped going to club altogether like over 5 years ago. keep in mind this was in a dive bar that plays the usual stuff and indie rock.

this album is pretty overrated but i still love my girls despite the corny lyrics

cant imagine it really working on the dancefloor though, like maybe without the long intro

maybe this is AC's big trick. rather than something like Kraftwerk, this is electronic music you CAN'T dance to.

hard to pick a best song tbh, the album is so stacked and works really well as a piece. gun to my head tho it's either Guys Eyes or Brother Sport

*rolls eyes* so it's taken y'all ten years to realise what some of us were saying at the time huh

Feels like the pro and anti-AnCo are the same as they were ten years ago.

pro and anti-AnCo camps. I mean.

ac jumped the shark for me when they went all ritalin hyped N high energy circa Centpidede HZ

fuck that's music to make you wanna gouge yerself

hot pocket take: alfred is OTM, another thing that bugs me about this song is how it celebrates a facile gentrified life which is equivocal with social status...it's an insincere song and an anthem for nihilists, but alfred pointed all this out i'm sure.

I guess xp

this album wasn't as discouraged as I wish it had been. now you have stuff like the new Palm album, revisiting its hateful showy tunelessness and arch polyrhythmic fuss as if that's what indie is supposed to be these days

fully aware that this opinion will irk some of you but ilm is nothing if not a melting-pot of opinions. and hey I just advertised the Palm album to MPP's advocates. get on that shit -_-

alfred is OTM, another thing that bugs me about this song is how it celebrates a facile gentrified life which is equivocal with social status..

^^^ this

I don't think My Girls celebrates or yearns for a gentrified life. "I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls" = I just want the bare minimum - shelter - to be with and protect my family.

oh come on that is the most transparent false modesty in pop history

the Palm record does not sound like MPP, more like Strawberry Jam or late 00s bands like Abe Vigoda.

xp is it?

The big problem when Animal Collective crossed over in the year end list bonanza was suddenly all these people interpreting whatever Animal Collective had to say about anything.

also assuming that the song is completely autobiographical, which is a mistake imo. if anything MPP could be criticized for fully embracing the cultural tourism of tribalism more so than any other AC record. the song that immediately follows My Girls, Also Frightened, is all about living in the jungle and shit. I always read the lyrics as very primal, as if spoken from the perspective of early man. Which like I said has potentially problematic implications, but it's definitely not a pro-gentrification song.

The big problem when Animal Collective crossed over in the year end list bonanza was suddenly all these people interpreting whatever Animal Collective had to say about anything.

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, May 3, 2018 2:23 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, this is OTM. they're storytellers, they've never written a message song, a lot of their lyrics (esp. avey tare) are on their face laughable/silly. I think the only topic they've ever written about with any kind of depth or insight is love.

They make strange campfire songs about being kid tigers, bee and canoes and even something about how a bat will fly and the dude writes this one song about how his dad passed away and how he wants to be a good father and people call him insincere and a gentrifier, wonder if they ever stood a chance with some people.

his second solo album Young Prayer is entirely about the death of his dad yeah, plus references in "Brother Sport" and "Tropic of Cancer" from PBVSGR

Ross OTM, although I'd argue they jumped the shark the moment they formed and unfortunately weren't eaten by that very same shark.

i dont live in a camp there are songs i like and songs i dont

I don't think My Girls celebrates or yearns for a gentrified life. "I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls" = I just want the bare minimum - shelter - to be with and protect my family.

― flappy bird, Thursday, May 3, 2018 2:20 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah didn't they have kids around this time? to me it seemed like a post 2k take on domesticity (filtered through world music compilations)

idk the idea they're storytellers seems weird to me, at best on feels/st they did communication ideas about family/isolation whatever, but they're pretty dada to me

communicate*

well adam apparently you live in a cave if your sn is anything to go by :p

yeah

/I don't think My Girls celebrates or yearns for a gentrified life. "I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls" = I just want the bare minimum - shelter - to be with and protect my family.

― flappy bird, Thursday, May 3, 2018 2:20 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark/

yeah didn't they have kids around this time? to me it seemed like a post 2k take on domesticity (filtered through world music compilations)

MPP is mostly stories, not as abstract lyrically as Feels or SJ