Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

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

I like the lyrics to Monkey Riches. One of the better post-Occupy indie songs written.

Flappy you can have this one

Discussing or arguing about ac is a thing I Just Don’t Care About

very understandable

You’re great tho :)

surely it's 'immaterial things'?
also, Merriweather was not a good album but the 7 track EP with' What Would I Want Sky' was excellent and a lot of the stuff they did before was also excellent

Van Horn Street preaching truth through this thread :-)

it is ‘material things,’ and fwiw the song was originally called ‘house’

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

https://media.giphy.com/media/c6NARXsgpItVfejVVb/giphy.gif

the one line of note I find interesting is that they refer to their social status as a "material thing." maybe that classification ...

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Thursday, May 3, 2018 6:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I always thought it was poor writing; that the 'like' should have been 'as'. ("I don't mean, To seem like I care about material things Like as our social status") Which still isn't correct but makes more sense.

One of the worst things about AC is something that seems to be forced onto them: that the world suddenly thought it extremely important to completely dissect and interpret what is just a dumb lyric. Dumb lyrics do not deserve such scrutiny. I'm not saying it's through no fault of their own; I'm pretty sure they did not mind being the posterboys for Carles/Hipster Runoff ~ironic~ schtick. Still though, that seems like decades ago (gladly so).

I don't care about AC any more, but My Girls is still a jam. And 'false modesty' is a meaningless indictment against pretty much every lyricist, or author, or poet imo.

good mourning!

lmao

Adam - my main man

I saw them on the feels tour and they were playing strawberry jam.

I still really like the run of Animal Collective albums from Sung Tongs to this one but have never really paid much attention to their lyrics, or even thought much about the lines that stand out like the My Girls one. They're a 'sound' band for me. Adam Bruneau's anecdote about people trying dance to them in a club rings very true though, definitely experienced that at least once.

Yeah, I've tried to put them on at parties as well, and it didn't work. And Peacebone worked much better than anything off of MPP. There was a misreading of them at that point, I also think In the Flowers got a lot of credit for having a 'dubstep drop', which sounds quite weird today. I think many writers struggled to figure out how they were as inspired by electronic music as they claimed to be, even on Sung Tongs, and overcorrected.

I'd still say Here Comes the Indian is their best, btw.

merriweather.....POOP pavilion

🎶 i want to scoop di poop with you 🎶

Shakedown otm

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/11/animal-collective-oral-history

oof

Brian DeRan

I remember turning down very large licensing requests and making light of the whole thing, many times to the exasperation of the label. A Pizza Hut request came in and one of them replied with, “We will take that pizza with pepper-NO-ni.” Another came from Volkswagen for which the reply was, “That’s going to be a “PASS-at.”

More unnecessary dissection of what is essentially just a clumsily-written line: “I don’t want to seem like I care about material things, like (a) social stats” ... I dunno why this line carries so much weight. It goes round & round in my head, an awkward earworm. It’s pretty self-evident what he wants to say, & that he’s just stonedly shoehorning the words in, errors & all, to scan. “I don’t want to give the impression of caring about material things or the social status associated with them. I just want the barest of necessities for muh girls, WOO!” But the funny, sticky thing about it for me is the SEEM. That hipster-looking-over-his-shoulder self-consciousness: not that he’s actually striving not to care, driving for some ascetic sainthood, but that he doesn’t want to SEEM like he’s a (scuse the term) normie. The narrator probably authentically doesn’t care, but over and above the really-not-caring is a more overriding sense of caring quite a lot about whether he’s perceived to care.

Anyhow, “My Girls” is a jam, flaws & all. I never listen to these guys anymore, but I can be counted on to bust out my old-man dance moves when this reverb-drenched mess of a mini-masterpiece comes on.

agreed

The line does scan very awkwardly but I think the "seem" makes sense if you think of the second line as not being about requiring the "barest of necessities" but wanting to pay for a house. Which is an expensive material thing that is only able to be acquired with a substantial amount of money which, in turn, requires AC (and him as a solo artist) to make money which in turn requires that they/he be popular.

I suspect the audience for what he ~seems~ to care about is his family rather than people who might judge him: the song always struck me as being an apology for wanting the band to be successful (and devoting time to that at the expense of family time), justified by it creating the opportunity for him provide for his family.

But it's so awkwardly constructed that it's not surprising people reach different views.

10 years old this weekend

thinking the answer is Also Frightened, for its hypnotic swing and gleefully strangled harmonies

ringer retro if that sorta thing is interesting ~

https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/1/4/18167715/animal-collective-merriweather-post-pavilion-10th-anniversary-panda-bear-avey-tare

in retrospect, 'No More Runnin' is the best song on here

also like Bluish and Lion In A Coma. the rest falls prey to being horrifically of its time and way shrill. Still I can't believe it's 10 years old, that's crazy

I can’t bring myself to listen to this in 2018 at all

2019 either

the worst of GAPDY

noooo way! I hardly revisit MPP, honestly can't remember the last time I did, as opposed to all of their other records (including the new stuff). I'll never forget listening to the leak on Xmas night 2008, absolutely mind-blowing experience... but it is very "hi fi" for lack of a better term, and that polished sheen wears your ears down after a while. Is this how people regarded Nevermind in 2001?

Not sure about polished. they as a band were making some quite deliberate sonic choices including this sort-of pixilated electronic harshness that they'd grown increasingly keen on.

They'd always been a band that had experimented with noise, or more often drones - the acoustic pastoral phase between Campfire Songs and Feels made great use of that.

And before on the early Avey and Panda albums, you still got the sense they were experimenting with lo-fi noise-making equipment.

But from Strawberry Jam onwards, the songs started getting smeared in this chippy synth ooze; Avey took to doing his chimp-screech voice a bit too much; there was less subtlety, less space for the band to breathe; and everything just felt claustro like looking at an old CRT far too close-up.

By MPP, the songs had matured but their content was starting to align with the Kinfolk lumbster set of that time - big beardy men with soft voices and a fondness for log cabins - a watering-down of the freakfolk scene that AC had also been lumped in with.

I can see why people weren't and still aren't so hot on the album, but I also felt that ILM at the time was unnecessarily cruel about it, and AC, at the time.

Almost all the hate was aimed at 'My Girls' - not a particularly great song, and neither particularly representative of their overall sound. MPP, despite its flaws, is a diverse album with at least three 'hits', a good few deep cuts and of course a good bunch of unmemorable or just plain annoying songs.

great post dog latin

I do love My Girls

I recoiled from this album on contact.

really their first five albums - Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished, Danse Manatee, Campfire Songs, Here Comes the Indian, and Sung Tongs are their best imo

of those, Campfire Songs is the one that means the most to me

it's a decent, not great album that was way overrated at the time with corresponding excessive backlash. one of their better albums but certainly not their best or some sort of defining album of the 00s or anything

it's definitely a more polished sound than anything they'd done before, their previous works were all relatively lo-fi in sound, sometimes to good effect but often just sounding like a muddy mess like on strawberry jam

i probably love about half the album and don't really care for the rest much at all - that organ arpeggio on 'daily routine' is still really grating to me, something about the beat drop on 'in the flowers' doesn't quite work for me,
'also frightened' is ok but feels a little empty, 'taste' is pretty nothing-y

the 'also frightened' issue applies to a lot of this album i guess, it's so heavy on the reverb that things don't quite hit as hard as i'd want them to and often leaves nothing between the psych-y ambience and the fairly low basslines

my girls still rules though