Animal Collective - Merriweather POLL Pavilion

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?

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.