Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

Well yeah, to me 2009 looked like Electrik Red and The-Dream and lots of uk funky and etc. and to others it was other stuff again, but to (it seemed like) 80% of critics it was mostly GAPDY, and that’s what seemed stifling at the time.

CHVRCHES aren't an indie rock band!

― Le Baton Rose (Turrican), Saturday, January 5, 2019 4:56 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah they are, they are electronic but they are totally indie rock

"this band isn't indie rock!" - an argument in 2019

It's not an argument, just mere fact. CHVRCHES are a pop band. If CHVRCHES are indie rock, then so are Erasure. Erasure aren't indie rock either.

Yeah they're indie stop being obtuse

Like 3 people in indie bands in glasgow start a synth pop group = it's indie baby

lmao none more indie

Then by that logic, if they'd started a jazz fusion band you'd still be calling it indie, which is pretty idiotic.

They wouldn't do that tho because they're too indie

Cool. Well, I'm gonna crank The Innocents now - that legendary indie rock classic.

Oh god I just cited them and Vile because they both seem in that middle class career wise, didn't know this was gonna get Turricanned.

I can’t really extract my overall feelings for AC from my feelings for Panda Bear solo which are very positive. Tomboy following Person Pitch is one of the nicest build upon/reinventions and frankly a breathtaking follow up to a widely-considered-classic-album (I think it is, too)— those two albums are prob my favourites of this entire GAPDY thing

My favourite of all this era tho was GGD both live and on record

Agreed GGD were the best.

yeah person pitch is my favourite ac-related album easily. tomboy is decent but not as like texturally rich so i never got into it in the same way though

ggd were and still are the best, eye contact is one of my favourite albums ever

Well yeah, to me 2009 looked like Electrik Red and The-Dream

These were two of my favorites too, and outside ILM I felt like an outlier. It took only, what, a couple more years for us to stand in place for the rest of rockcrit to catch up.

Black Dice put out their best album in 2009, to me they were second only to AC as the most exciting and unique band of this era (and Eric Copeland has a similarly stellar solo career, arguably eclipsing his main band just like Panda Bear). GGD were good but I always found them kind of boring, though they have tracks, and God's Money is pretty great all the way thru.

I don't consider GGD or Black Dice from the GAPDY scene, they feel like no1ze ppl that got dancey

I don't consider GGD or Black Dice from the GAPDY scene, they feel like no1ze ppl that got dancey

GAPDY '09 sounded like they were taking cues from BTTLS (SING THIS HOOK OH AY OH) and Anco in particular from YES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_Gl6kI1_Xw

who burned down the MPP 9012live when they boys were in kindergarten (?)

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/yes/1984/merriweather-post-pavilion-columbia-md-6bdf2296.html

Black Dice did a bunch of collabs with Wolf Eyes... That's not GAPDY vibes

Black Dice and Lightning Bolt show pics

http://www.self-titledmag.com/2009/10/31/microwave-only-devils-night-with-black-dice-lightning-bolt-and-a-bunch-of-brooklynites-dressed-up-as-bat-for-lashes-miss-piggy-more/

I'd agree there's a link between Black Dice and the earlier Animal Collective stuff, they toured and released a split EP together at some point right?

I still love this album although I admit I haven't played it in a while. Sung Tongs is by far my favourite of the group records at this point.

Avay Tare and Eric Copeland had a band together! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Tones

Maybe I'm off on this, but for a minor band AC plays some pretty big venues. I remember them selling out Stubb's in particular.

Put it this way, AnCo is like Randall "Pink" Floyd in Dazed and Confused, they can travel between groups but he's still GAPDY, whereas Wolf Eyes are like Slater.

Like they can be cool with each other and do a side project/go get Aerosmith tickets but fundamentally they aren't from the same scene

Haha!

AC played with Wolf Eyes a lot in the early days

On sure but then AnCo joined the football team and they kinda grew apart, but they still got together sometimes

haha

someone said it upthread, but the whole GAPDY thing wasn't a scene, it was just that those 5 bands were the favorites of a particularly strong critical consensus that year (5 of the top 6 albums AND songs in the PnJ poll came from the GAPDY). And they were all to one extent or another "established" indie acts, and therefore pretty easy to yawn at.

Of course AnCo emerged from the early 2000s noise scene (covered in this Whiney thread), "GAPDY" status doesn't eliminate that or give their noizier fellow travelers "GAPDY" status

that said GGD was one of my favorite bands of that era, always glad to see them get love. I liked that "noise bands" get blissed out era, high places was another band that had similar vibes to me

I've accepted that I have zero idea of how popular anyone is in real world terms these days. Like, I thought Kurt Vile was indie-famous and doing fine, but I didn't know that he could sell out a 2500 capacity venue in Wisconsin.

Similarly, I hadn't heard of this band Lake Street Dive until a few months ago, but all the 40+ year olds I know were like "oh yeah, of course" and they sold out the same venue. I'm not sure where they would even hear about a band like that (inoffensive folk-y r&b) besides NPR?

Kurt Vile has made Obama's top songs/albums list a couple years at least, including the recent one.

Xpost Jordan - I'm sure your familiar with the Current npr station in Mpls, stream that and you'll get a great view into that whole Lake Street Drive hip for basics (tm) scene

idk how we got here, but kurt vile is one of the most played artists on alt rock radio

I've relistened to this album all the way through and my conclusions are:

- I'm not a lyrics person and I never cared about AC's lyrics because half the time they're way too obfuscated to understand, so it's strange to see so much emphasis on the lyrics to My Girls
- I'm surprised that this was such a crossover hit in the US (playing at frat parties etc). Hardly the case in the UK.
- The lyrics are one thing - you could interpret them one of many ways - but for me the production on My Girls is representative of the downfall of this album. This song would be a million times better if the production had been bigger. Those big bass hits just don't sound very big at all. It's like dance music with all the oomph sucked out of it. The semblance of bass, without the low end. The vocals should be beautiful and soaring but they're flat and sit awkwardly in the mix.
- I'd love to hear a remixed version of the whole album. Tone down all the horrible squiggly deteriorated synth noises, let the thing breathe a bit, get rid of the DAW reverb that suddenly so many bands were flooding their music with at that point. There are good songs in here, but they're so overstuffed and compressed and undynamic that something like Daily Routine just wooshes past without touching the sides.

Good to see some Tomboy loving. I prefer it to Person Pitch and MPP by a considerable stretch. Never got the hang of Person Pitch

completely agree about the mix - i do like my girls a lot as it is but it could have been so much better than it was. it at least sounds much better on record than most of the dreadful live versions

Person Pitch's appeal was really about "Comfy In Nautica" being such a shock in its simplicity, brutally repetitious production and a sing-song melody, I remember feeling incredibly wide-eyed wow the first time a friend put it on. It's a very aesthetically extreme album and the extremity of what-it-was-doing has probably become less impactful, but it seemed so bold at the time

I was a big fan of AC and Panda Bear's Young Prayer at the time but Person Pitch made very little impact.

I revisit it occasionally and it leaves me totally cold other than maybe the last track which is quite pretty. Again, it's a production thing for me - a sound that had become increasingly popular between about 2007-2011 where indie types were experimenting with dance music and, at the same time, shoegaze, but getting them both a bit wrong.

Whatever continuum encompassed both Caribou and Grizzly Bear: 4/4 beats stripped of bass, devoid of funk and played reed-thin; Beach Boys-influenced harmonies with all the blood let out; layer upon layer upon layer of twiggly folk guitar; electronic reverb applied with a spade. I hated it so much.

fwiw the only AC song with a bass guitar is What Would I Want? Sky

dog latin: makes sense you dig Ponytail the most of all the songs on PP, that one always seemed to me like a preview/transitional piece to Tomboy.

that's a good point. they don't have a bass player, never really struck me. but yes the synthetic bass they use on their work is horrible. I say that as a fan

Maybe because I was so used to the live versions of these songs - saw them the week Strawberry Jam came out, and listened to countless bootlegs - when I heard the album I was blown away by the bass presence. As opposed to SJ, where imo they neutered a stellar group of dark songs into something too dry, too clean - MPP sounded fully realized, evolved, high-def. I love the production on MPP and think Ben Allen was the perfect person to produce it, I hear lots of bass, but perhaps it was just obvious in comparison to the live versions.

my problem with the lyrics on "My Girls" isn't the theme but rather that they sound like they were written by someone who does not speak English

I just realised the melody from Comfort In Nautica always reminded me faintly of the Thames Television ident..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DuN5QiUk00E

xp that's AC all over though. it's what I liked about previous albums. the lyrics sounded like they'd literally been written by animals who had somehow become lucid and it really worked with that bongos and acoustic guitars vibe they were doing then.

but on My Girls they do just sound a bit lazy, The idea that 'social status' is a 'material thing', the use of 'Adobe slabs'. There is something facile and tossed off about it, as opposed to primal

I agree PB's lyrics have always been facile. the one that always bugged me was the chorus of "Take Pills": "I don't want for us to take pills / anymore / not that it's bad." --- huh???

I remember reading or hearing recently that he writes the vocal melodies first always and finds words that fit the cadence... hence such mindblowing lyrics on his recent "Part of the Math": "I'm an animal / I'm a mineral / I'm a vegetable / I'm an abacus / alright."

but he's always good for some gems, like "Sunset," which does have the line "were a peacock in the rain / slain / when a bum note is in play," but the line "every day I found a euro on the ground" within the context of the song's severe melancholy hits me hard. that's a beautiful song.

p4k weighs in: Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion Was Radical Enough to Redefine Indie Music. Why Didn’t It?

the absolute state of that headline jfc