Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

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

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?