Overview

Animal Collective is group consisting of arrangements of Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Avey Tare (David Portner), Geologist (Brian Ross), and Deakin (Joshua Dibb). They rose to prominence after the release of the single My Girls, in 2009.

Album Rating
Here Comes the Indian (2003) 7
Sung Tongs (2004) 6
Person Pitch (2007) 7.5
Merriweather Post Pavillion (2008) 7

As Animal Collective


Here Comes the Indian (2003)

Perhaps one of Animal Collective peak moments of experimentation was the amoebic, shapeless Here Comes the Indian. Recorded circa 2003 and released the 17th June 2003, this album blends and represents what the Collective stood for: nonsensical nonchalance, free-form experimentation, and what i really appreciate from them, the organic integration of synthesizers and field recordings into rock music.

Where does this album fit in their discography? It comes after the debut Spirit They’ve Vanished, Spirit They’re Gone (apocalyptic lullaby), but before Sung Tongs (freak folk). This album features the 4 members for the first time, and this is reflected in the convoluted, all-over-the-place production of the album.

  • Native Belle has beautiful vocal arrangements. Not beautiful as in a church chorus, but rather as in the raw appreciation of wilderness. Notably Panda Bear and Avey Tare have no problem in pushing their vocal capabilities and using it in odd ways.

  • Hey Light follows the trend of the opening track, but implements drumming and guitars. It’s like a cover of The Beatles performed by mentally unstable people, or a collapsed, incoherent version of any track in Frank Zappa’s Uncle Meat, as if he suddenly lost any attachment to formal music theory.

  • Infant Dressing Table is mostly ambient, but features very light “drumming” (which is actually a repeated sample), but at the middle point the seemingly unrelated melodies converge into a crescendo which is then turned into liquid.

  • Panic is the equivalent of a trippy night in the woods. Wild screaming, furious and primitive drumming, it’s the Collective’s cover of the Maoris.

  • Two Sails on a Sound is very reminiscent of early times. This track could easily rest in-between Spirit They’re Gone and Danse Manatee. An amoebic, encapsulated display of textures. Really outstanding.

  • Slippi is a taste of what is to come. The wild side of the Collective shines with the brightest colors (for more of this, please refer to Strawberry Jam).

Wild yet coherent, tribal and native yet displaying a mindful treatment of textures, Here Comes the Indian is the identity of early Animal Collective in their very own habitat.


Sung Tongs (2004)

The album was recorded during late 2003 and early 2004, and released on May of the latter year. This is perhaps the most acoustic phase of Animal Collective, as the album features looped and layered guitars, very gentle drumming, and a robust use of samples and heavy screaming (as is the norm for the band). In fact, the 2018 tour features Avey Tare, Panda Bear, their respective guitars, and a couple of drums.

This album is folk a’la Animal Collective. There certainly are guitars, and the heartfelt vocals are there, but there is something off-putting hidden in the tracks, and that is, of course, the quirkiness that, at this point, haw become commonplace for the collective.

Sung Tongs kicks off with Leaf House, a bossanovaesque tune that hunches back to their work with Vashti Bunyan in Prospect Hummer (the self titled track in the EP). Syncopated guitars built over a pumping, steady beat, and (probably Avey-written) absurd lyrics mark the way for the tracks to come. In the same fashion, Who Could Win a Rabbit is an adventure. It’s compacted hype for an upcoming road trip with your high school friends. A bit similar to the opener, but happier.

The first standout comes from two tracks that i always listen back to back: The Softest Voice and Winter’s Love. While The Softest Voice is reflective and a bit cold, which kind of takes away from the album. However, Winter’s Love is pure, charming, and lovely. The latter is separated into two parts: the first one is kind of a continuation of The Softest Voice, with far heard vocals, a gentle guitar strumming, and Caribbean percussion; the second section turns around the overall mood of the song: Avey’s vocals come into play, with a simple (and a bit obvious) refrain: “our love is like a winter’s love”. A charming moment in the album, without a doubt.

The follow-up, Kids On Holiday, is the sequel of the second section of The Softest Voice. Kids is lowkey, delivers a quiet yet urgent message: youth is perhaps the brightest moment in one’s life. The way in which Avery narrates so acutely (but at the same time so blurry) a kid’s holiday is very contemplative (the song is a bit long, around 5 minutes).

It employs a similar formula, though this time it sounds a bit more repetitive and formulaic. Yes, the ambience feels fresh and coherent with the other tracks, but Kids doesn’t give nor does it take away. In my opinion, it sounds a bit derivative of the Prospect Hummer EP.

Sweet Road and its companion, We Tigers, are amazing on their own, and great tracks on their own.

The second standout of the album comes in the form of ghostly, nocturne and elongated Visiting Friends. In this track the collective formalize the babbling of The Softest Voice and craft a fantasia for the 21st century: Avey and Panda surely learned from what My Bloody Valentine and Slint were doing with rock music (shoegaze and post-rock respectively), but also learned from what Vashti Bunyan taught them in Prospect Hummer, and from their work in Campfire Songs. I have found myself lost in thought while listening to the song, its simplicity trances me, and introspection comes to me (this is a personal favourite, as can be seen).

After the melodic and dreamy Visiting Friends comes Mouth Wooed Her, Good Lovin Outside, and Whaddit I Done, which are the lowest point of the album. They don’t introduce anything new: in fact, the playfulness of Whaddit I Done is reminiscent of first-section Winter’s Love, as is the second section of Good Lovin Outside. A strong mid-section is torn down by a very weak ending.

Sung Tongs is the folk album of Animal Collective. It summarizes (and conglomerates) their efforts from previous years (Prospect Hummer, Campfire Songs) into one big, childish, emotional, nostalgic blob.


Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

At its core, Merriweather Post Pavillion is a collection of synth-heavy, synaesthetic love songs. But the muse of the love songs isn’t physical: the lyrics reflect a deep love of life, of simpleness, of the mere fact of being alive. Each song on the album is a creature of its own:

  • In The Flowers is a blob that stalls a bit in the mid section, but finally reaches a blissful explosion towards the end

  • Daily Routine (held on a single note for the entirety of the song) is a reflection on the beauty of monotonicity; and, positioned in a throne

  • My Girls’ cascading synths and fading “bass” are but a mere addition to the stronger and driving element: Panda Bear and Avey Tare’s vocals. Arguably Animal Collective’s most famous song, and for a very good reason: it manages to be quirky and fruity (it sounds like grapes) without losing its commercial appeal; it encompasses the band’s identity up to that point: from* Spirit They’ve Vanished* to Strawberry Jam (passing through texturally dense moments, such as those found in Danse Manatee), the Collective have been a neon, amorphic body of ideas and colors, bound to no container and rainbow-tinted.

  • Summertime Clothes cleverly takes a guitar drowning in pedal effects and meshes it with synths used as a backing track. The one-two steady rhythm propels the military chant of Avey Tare into battle, as Panda Bear’s bardic voice guides the intermezzos of war.

  • Bluish is a love song. Its synths have entangled into one another, and are desperately trying to escape, but the movement of one of them causes the mesh to whale. The orchestration is alive, and Panda Bear is singing a lullaby to it. I love this one ❤

  • Brothersport (a personal favourite) goes wild, and is quite reminiscent of Anco’s early psychedelic days (Here Comes the Indian-esque times). It’s middle section is a *raconto

The second half of the album has some derails that didn’t contribute much to the album:

  • Guy’s Eyes structure is typical of a pop song, though the bare bones drumming and ever-increasing, screeching leading synth give it a tribal atmosphere, which is elevated by the Collective’s intertwined and mutual overstepping.

  • Though they are not, i like to think of Taste and Lion in a Comma as interludes, because they sound like a previously used textures filtered through a melange of reverb-heavy and pitch-tuning effects. Their contribution to the album is limited to their lack of progression.

Writing this 8 years after the album’s release allows me to meditate on what it meant for pop culture. My Girls exploded, which prompted a revisiting of their discography. They were all around the Internet: blogs, Pitchfork, and virtually every independent medium was talking about them.

From the impossibly blissful My Girls to the Beck-meets-Beach Boys glissando whirl of Summertime Clothes, this is a joyful, transcendent record somehow reminiscent of kids let loose in a musical sandpit.

The Guardian

This album partially went on to influence some projects, such as Neon Indian and Jai Paul (though his is a story on its own), and the band gained a cult following. With its rainbow pallet of colors,it proposed a Dadaistic approach to making pop that kept its feet on the ground.

Merriweather Post Pavillion is an ode to innocence, to our earliest memories of color and taste. Its multicolored textures implode into a gradient of artificially natural pigments, with which the lyrics paint a fresco of youth and adulthood, two concepts that, the the Collective, are equally contingent and intertwined.


Single Careers


Panda Bear

Person Pitch (2007)

A fourth of the Animal Collective, Noah Lennox, created one of the most outstanding pieces of mainstream music of the 2000s with Person Pitch.

The degree of deconstruction (a termed coined and perhaps pioneered by Roxy Music’s Brian Eno, link right here if you’re curious) which he reached with Person Pitch makes the melodies in the album alien, other-worldly, as if he had wanted to communicate the concept of music to people with absolutely no familiarity with it (aliens? dogs?). I want to review some of the frescos painted by Panda Bear on this album:

  • Comfy In Nautica features a Brazilian chorus, with leads the song, and Lennox’s voice. These two elements collapse towards the end of the song.
  • Take Pills is divided into two parts: * the first is a campfire song, featuring traditional acoustic arrangements; * the second is a urban tribal celebration, chanted from the inside of an apartment complex.
  • Bros, the outstanding track on the album, extends for 12 minutes. It creates an organic atmosphere, featuring bizarre samples (which perhaps make up for the organic part of the track). A lullaby, a percussion-lead exploration of traditional acoustic instruments, which then speed up injects the Brazilian saudade and turns up the nonchalance singing (really characteristic of early Animal Collective).
  • I’m Not, as well as Search for Delicious are early chillwave. Lennox may have been late to freak folk in Sung Tongs, but he is a precursor of the abstraction and juxtaposition of ambient and rock music.

Pop music hadn’t sounded so fresh in quite some time.