Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Thanks Contenderizer! I'm working on new True Swamp material but it goes slowly bcuz I have a 40hr day job these days. Chippin' away tho.

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seriously, who listens to Animal Collective specifically for the lyrical content? are people poring through Winters Love trying to find words they can parse and then saying "SEE? NOSTALGIA!"

don't get it

― HPSCHD, Monday, September 28, 2009 6:12 PM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark

i assume ppl are more talking about HYPNOGAGA POP

i have a dumb question-

why did we revive the mpp thread for this?

also xxxxxpost Whiney, a lot of this wave of cartoonists can draw like DEMONS, like scary good, but seem to want to wallow in the middle school psych thing.

Goin' home now.

this is no longer the mpp thread so much as the thread where whiney gets mad about something every couple months

me mad

haha i think my problem is opening an Animal Collective thread thinking "Hmm, maybe someone's said something interesting about Animal Collective!"

this is no longer the mpp thread so much as the thread where whiney gets mad about something every couple months

― fleetwood (max), Monday, September 28, 2009 6:15 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, at least until he posts in a different thread

http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles/78105/projects/213057/781051240168448.jpg

i mean back in the day i had to deal with a band called Bunnygrunt

― Mr. Que, Monday, September 28, 2009 2:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw bunnygrunt is still around. i don't know if they used to be really twee but they aren't particularly twee or "nostalgic" as far as i can tell; they're basically just decent loud pop

btw i am sick of nostalgic kids music too, or even nostalgic teenager music like the hold steady ... i'd like to hear more bands of 30-year-olds singing songs about being 30

it's kinda funny how 80s cartoon dayglo toddler chic has been like the de facto mode of the Baltimore indie scene for ages (not really IDing Animal Collective as part of that scene because i didn't even have any concept of being from Maryland until years after they left) to the point that i hadn't even given it the kind of serious thought it's getting here in a long time.

xpost psh-man i wanna hear me some teenagers singing songs about being 30

I remember reading descriptions of AC back in the early 2000's describing them as being "nostalgic" and thinking no, that's not right at all - AC aren't tapping the same vein as, say, Boards of Canada. So it's very disappointing to hear them basically reiterating these lazy descriptions. AC if anything are primitivist, not nostalgic. Their sound is that of technologically advanced cavemen, not media-besotted children.

cavemen nostalgia

if there can be such a thing... i'm just not convinced by AC's attempts to connote childlike feelings, but i am convinced by their attempts to convey chimp-like feelings. Does that make sense?

a chimp child?

Bonobos are the thing now, didn't you know?

Charlie - ctrl+f canada on this thread - coldplay are better and way less overrated than animal collective

Nick, what specifically am I meant to be looking at?

Not sure I buy the "cavemen, not children thing". Maybe circa Here Comes the Indian (with Hollinndagain, the earliest AnCo stuff I'm familiar with). Forest noises and tribal chanting, etc. But Sung Tongs has a kids-at-play feel. Naive, sugar-buzzed, unrestrained. Not all the way through, but certainly on the first couple songs, and occasionally thereafter. It doesn't seem at all nostalgic, though. There's no sense of sentimentalized melancholy, of unbridgeable distance from a fondly remembered ideal. Rather it seems immediate, like an attempt to recreate or mimic a childlike state in the here and now. (And maybe that perception can be projected back onto the primitivist early stuff: kids playing at being Indians, cavemen, whatever.)

There's a brief interplay between me and Tim F about memory; recording of a memory vs memory of a recording, specifically.

Where would I be able to read that Nick?

Ah, forget it, soz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nJ5n4GX5ag

There's a band called "Reading Rainbow" now

I can't wait for our nation of late-twentysomethings to completely exhaust the well of pop culture nostalgia until every band is named "Salute Your Shorts"

Salute Your Shorts and the Heeeeeyyyy Duuuuude Orchestra

There's a band called "Reading Rainbow" now

wait really?

http://www.myspace.com/levarmotherfuckingburton

Wow, real "shocking" what they sound like too

new AC album? http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Be-Kind-Animal-Collective/dp/B002RD4V08/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1254884380&sr=8-2

taylor saporito to thread

hahaha whiney

five bucks says this isn't real.

it's probably a live album or something.

It's a round-table discussion in which they respond to critics of this album one by one.

probably gonna be pretty boring: "thanks; thanks; thanks; thanks; thanks."

Does anyone else think the new Fuck Buttons single "Surf Solar" sounds like something off this record?

"probably gonna be pretty boring: "thanks; thanks; thanks; thanks; thanks.""

Sounds a bit like "Brothersport" I heard.

so this is going to be a new EP, YEAH!:

http://pitchfork.com/news/36753-animal-collectives-avey-tare-reveals-all-about-new-ep-film-tour-hiatus/

I'm pretty excited about the film. Sounds non-narrative and psychedelic!

In Hogan's P4k review of Neon Indian, he pretty much nails what I'm talking about. But isn't complaining about it like I am.

Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.

Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.

There you go that is perfect!

Glo-fi, I think, is a really good term for it. One thing I remember about being a kid in the 80s is that everything was glowing with this digital haze. I'm thinking TV commercials with vector graphics (lines of glowing light) and the fuzzy appearance of analog video technology. Then you had all these pop songs drenched in digital reverb (or at least the snare drum). So the music was kind of glowing.

Well, plus the fondness for bright pastel colors and simple primaries, retro 50s "populuxe" color schemes and design. There definitely was a neon simplicity to popular youth culture in general. What's funny is how precise and clear it seemed at the time, in contrast to drab, brown 70s-realist fuzziness. It was an era of sharpness, not of haze, at least in terms of how it narrated itself to itself. Pac Man/Tron graphic were (or seemed) idealized & clean, like Esprit stripes & Jellies.

Retrospectively, that all changes. VHS vs. Blu-Ray.

so it's 80s + weed basically

man so much of this stuff is gonna date so badly

Dream-beat, chillwave

yeah some of this stuff on the memory tapes album makes me think of bowery electric circa "lushlife". weren't there a cluster of groups that kinda went on this shoegaze meets trip hop thing for a little while in the mid-90s? not making a direct comparison, it just REMINDS me is all

x-post I dunno does revivalism ever really "date"?

Think about how electroclash just continues and continues and continues, just changing its name and scene-configuration every couple of years.

Perhaps what doe date w/r/t revivalism is just the sense that you cared, like "lol we were into that." So you can be contemptuous of your former enjoyment of hype-moments like britpop/elephant six/"the new rock revolution"/electroclash/hypnagogic pop, even though in fact all of the specific sounds those terms are meant to describe continue to hang around like bits of food between yr teeth.

Oh I for one expect all of these artists will enjoy enduring relevance at par with Dance Disaster Movement and Test Icicles.

There's a big difference b/w "dating" and "enjoying enduring relevance" though. Lots of music slips out of popular consciousness b/c it's not interesting or good enough even to be tied down to a particular point of time.

Test Icicles sounded awful at the time even.

Should say there's a big difference between "not dating" and "enjoying enduring relevance"...