Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

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

Thing is, the EP that came out around the same time, 'Fall Be Kind' was excellent.

Everything I liked about the band but balanced by their more electronic-infused sound (sans the horrible mid-range cacophony).

Lots of ideas, plenty of room to build a vibe, a more obviously melodic angle. I really like it.

had to look up whomst the Y in "GAPDY" referred to. earnestly thought it was Yeasayer lol

xp "their previous works were all relatively lo-fi in sound, sometimes to good effect but often just sounding like a muddy mess"

don't agree with this for their earliest works, only with strawberry jam onwards

oh yeah the reverb too. so many bands were doing this super washy reverb thing, but rather than sounding cool and shoegazey, it felt synthetic, like a software reverb had been applied liberally to each instrument, including the ones you wouldn't normally add reverb to.

still really like this album though the chorus to "My Girls" is arguably the worst lyric of all time

really?

I don't care for fancy things
Or to take part in the freshest wave
But to provide for mine who ask
I will, with heart, on my father's grave

I love those lyrics

Sung Tongs will always be my favorite but I can hang with this one. it does have a little too much of that 2000's era technicolor vomit effect going on though, and Avey's yelps are always intolerable

love the album, it's all tracks, the lyrical sensibility on the record is something they'd been organically working towards for several years (as the article points out). I wasn't here on ILM for the thrashing, but this was a major album at my high school. I think I burned a dozen or so copies not only for my friends, but people that were maybe casual music fans and just discovering them. suddenly me and my friends' favorite band was 'breaking thru' in a meaningful, observable way. it was awesome.

I do think it's funny how the article frames the Xmas leak in nostalgic terms, I mean give me a break. they were freaking out at the time. and the idea that albums don't retain peoples' attention for an entire year anymore? please. maybe not animal collective records, but DAMN. was inescapable for all of 2017.

also, when I figured out what GADPY stood for, I couldn't believe it. lumping those bands and those albums together with MPP is insane. and I like Bitte Orca. I remember the YYYs being really good. but give me a break. Fleet Foxes? ok Veckatimest had some tracks, but still. absolutely not.

GADPY?

2009:
Grizzly Bear
Animal Collective
Phoenix
Dirty Projectors
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I dunno, in retrospect I think all of those albums were pretty good

lumping in the Phoenix record is especially insane. and yea, I agree the rest are pretty good. MPP was a major milestone. it was the tall tree.

xp a Whiney thing if my memory is correct

credit to him that it's stuck

it's "GAPDY" fwiw

Phoenix is the one I most want to go back to, especially in light of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video

one of my favorite albums. i know they're not everyone's thing, but this honestly was one of the great bands of the centuries.

listening to it now makes me sad though for some reason.

also i strongly disagree with the person who said they hate the lyrics to my girls. i'm with dan s -- they're poignant and perfect

They're dangerous and stupid

!

why because they're heteronormative and glorify homeownership, which isn't sustainable?

My Girls is the most egregiously American song I've ever heard, with a song about and for black queer safe spaces re-appropriated to be a song about a rejection of community for safe ensconced family units built on acquired family money in remote ex-pat locations, a literally "I'm stealing from Detroit house to reject 'community' and build a house for my wife and child in Lisbon" realness, it is Donald Trump as a song good luck with it, and I'm a fan of this band and the man who wrote it, still: probably the worst song ever written, it is "Taxman" except built on a Frankie Knuckles sample

interesting fgti, wasn't aware of the personal history of that song or of any re-appropriation, I just related to it as a godparent (it was released in the year after my goddaughter was born, I think it will always be connected to her in my mind)

If I've ever being annoying at a dinner party, be assured you can put this song on and I'll be out the door in 15 seconds

lol

I want Funk Flex to drop a bomb on that fgti post

Lol some real nonsense in this thread

i'm into fgti's posts even though i love that song. i hadn't thought through the implications of that frankie knuckles sample.

i always saw that song as a kind of millennial ode to the vanishing dream of home ownership. the suburban life that counterculture always told people to resist, suddenly, doesn't even exist as a fallback for many of the types of people who would listen to AnCo. (obviously, for many, it never existed as a "fallback.")