Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

Bluish today

How about tomorrow?

woke up to 'Lion In A Coma' on a flight to Prague. combined with the Uma Thurman-like stewardess, it gave me wood.

What kind of planes are you people flying on?!

lol

They're on higher planes.

"paper planes"

voted for "paper planes".

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Nice results, about what I expected.

It's kind of a shame No More Runnin didn't get any votes. I guess people voted for the bangerz instead, but NMR has that lovely mellow Lindsey Buckingham ballad feel, with amazing harmonies. I could have voted for any of em except Taste and Also Frightened perosnally

"Also Frightened" is a lot better than this poll gives it credit for being.

I've just had a walk in the luxembourg garden (in paris) listening to MPP, under the glorious sunny blue sky, with kids playing around, pretty boys and pretty girls sunbathing under the trees and palm trees and boy how that felt good...
totally agree with the first part of the poll but yeah I would have put "also frightened" and "taste" around "bluish" and "summertime clothes" level.

"Also Frightened" = their best song, to date.

I do feel a little sorry for Also Frightened. Parts of it are really quite lovely.

always frightened is only good sometimes. but sometimes it is good.

It's stuck between two of the big "singles" on the record, so it has a lot to live up to.

fantastic, fantastic song. you can only pick one in these polls though ...

also frightened >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> summertime clothes (just so y'know...)

plus:

no more runnin >> lion in a coma >>>>>>>>>> summertime clothes

Yeah, I really can't believe "No More Runnin" didn't get a single vote!

nope, "Summertime Clothes" is the best song on this album!

agree to disagree, I guess?

"Daily Routine" > "Summertime Clothes" >>> "Also Frightened" >>>>> "My Girls"/"Brothersport" >>>>>>> the rest.

also frightened = barrett-era floyd

summertime clothes = zombies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEh2dhkWiUA

(via HRO)

delete world imo

it's in other thread iirc

man, can't keep up w/ the memes. there it is. thanking you

Bluish is miles away the best smh

bluish is good, but i think the right song won this poll. bluish is the least representative song on this album, it doesn't sound like animal collective the way my girls does. also the line "i'm getting lost in your curls" is kind of blegh, and sounds unnatural sung by avey tare for some reason.

classic album though.

it doesn't sound like animal collective

otm but we disagree on which way it cuts, I suppose

yo it's obv guys eyes

I really need to hear this album one of these days.

how about right now. it's on spotify. livepost your reactions.

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

the headline only comes into play in the last 3 grafs, the rest is pretty much the same as all the other retro pieces:

What’s slightly more surprising is Merriweather’s own lack of projected influence on indie at large. Even though chillwave, the electronic pop sub-genre borne out of the bedroom-recording movement of the early 2010s, is often attributed to Merriweather’s influence, its practitioners’ taste for hazy atmospherics and nostalgia-evoking reference points hews way closer to Person Pitch’s warped aesthetic than Merriweather’s high-gloss sheen. During much of the 2000s, acts that liberally borrowed from Animal Collective’s aesthetic were everywhere, from the electric abstractions of indie rockers Nurses to the off-kilter folk of acts like Our Brother the Native and Le Loup. But going into the 2010s, such acts simply stopped popping up, as much an acknowledgement of Merriweather’s unbeatablity as a signal of a new cultural focus taking hold in indie.

Even the level of mass excitement that led up to Merriweather’s release—a palpable sense of anticipation readily memorable to any aging indie fan who spent the 2000s with the type of high-speed internet access that only their university could provide—has yet to be replicated in the decade since. The collective sway of the internet’s attention is more diffuse, diverse, and ephemeral, and much of the emergent indie trends this decade have drawn from more melodically fertile ground than the defiantly outré sounds that Animal Collective worked in pre-Merriweather.

These changings of the guard aren’t bad things, they just are—and when it comes to Merriweather, they work in Animal Collective’s favor. The album’s singular mythology speaks to its strange and strangely simple pleasures. Animal Collective chose not to finish the conversation their most successful album started, and no one else even dared to try.

I may be alone in this but I more or less just consider this album the apex of chillwave. like, I know they weren't really part of that scene such as it was, but that's the cultural/musical context that it seems to slot into in terms of sound and approach.

lol xps

Washed Out and Neon Indian's signature hits all came out the same year, after all

I think that makes sense, in the same way that Nevermind is the apex of "grunge" despite Nirvana flying on their own and not really participating in the ensuing cultural wave (besides bumps for Soundgarden, Melvins, and Mudhoney, similar to the rising tide that helped AC's friends like Black Dice, Lightning Bolt, and GGD). in my mind Silverchair = Neon Indian is a perfect comparison.

it's all just post-Obama victory drugs-n-partying for norms music

i could write a book-length ilx post about what this album meant to me and others at my liberal arts college. i may just do that, even if it earns me 51 flag posts.

flappy bird otm.

haha

weird album for me in that i did really love it when i came out, though not as much as person pitch, but then i have listened to none of the ac related material that's been released subsequently.

if anyone is seeking bass from these guys please check out A Day with the Homies by Panda Bear, released last year. it's vinyl only and there's nothing online though............... I did make a tape bounce of it and it's in my dropbox uh... just sayin..........

Reminder that this year I'm either going to run or make seandalai run the overdue 2000-09 albums and tracks poll

mpp is a good hippie album, no more no less imo

this is overall good but referring to the MP3 blog era as "pre-algorithm" is really strange considering the existence/relative ubiquity of the Hype Machine https://pitchfork.com/features/article/animal-collectives-merriweather-post-pavilion-was-radical-enough-to-redefine-indie-music-why-didnt-it/

many interesting recent posts. never thought about it in this way but "post-Obama victory drugs-n-partying for norms music" in retrospect although maybe a little cynical makes some sense

I had the same experience as jim in vancouver, I liked the album but not as much as Person Pitch, and never followed them after that. I'm really enjoying hearing it again

I think I can understand why people *really* like this album, it does have a glow. the slight preferencing of treble over bass is an interesting choice and doesn't seem like one that is just based in amateurishness to me

Is anyone really ready for '00s nostalgia yet?

We should start a thread for all the forgotten 00s music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMOZRk74QrY

^dope song btw

some of the writing in that pitchfork article is v bad.

yeah

Nobody cares anymore but the live album that just came out is a perfect era capsule. I think I saw them three times btw Feels and MPP, that moment caught in time is still something special imo.

I can't believe the bootlegs I was drooling over before MPP came out are now on triple vinyl.

The beatless version of Banshee Beat is so great.