With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.
Since their inception, Animal Collective have wandered the territorial edges of music, scoping out where boundaries had been erected and looking beyond them. They've punctuated perfectly likeable indie rock songs with bleating vocalizations. They've seeded pretty instrumentals with irritating noise. They've juxtaposed West African rhythms and melodies cribbed from British folk. They've stayed on a single chord for 10 minutes. But Merriweather feels like a joyous meeting in a well-earned, middle place-- the result of all their explorations pieced together to create something accessible and complete.
Although it will be tagged as Animal Collective's "pop" album, Merriweather Post Pavilion remains drenched in their idiosyncratic sound, a record that no one else could have made. The album is named for a Maryland venue that last year played host to Santana, Sheryl Crow, and John Mayer, but its songs won't be heard on the radio, and besides, Animal Collective's M.O. requires them to exist outside of rigid formats. Nonetheless, they've found a natural way to integrate the sing-along melodies, sticky hooks, and driving percussion that have long been hallmarks of celebratory popular music.
Animal Collective's two vocalists, Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear), have never sounded better together, and the way their styles complement each other is the story of the album. On the one hand you have Panda's straightforward melodies, his fuzzy, head-in-the-clouds dreaminess, and his instinctual trawl through pop music history. The tracks that favor his songwriting typically have an underlying sense of drone, with everything moving forward along a line in relation to some subliminal center: They begin, then build, expand, and contract. Tare, meanwhile, tends to work within a more classic pop structure, with clear bridges and snappy choruses, greater harmonic development, and a sharper lyrical focus. Here, he reins in the blurting vocalizations that he's so often used as punctuation (the hardcore faithful might miss this unhinged emoting just a little). Both songwriters are on exactly the same page and, working with sonic spelunker Brian "Geologist" Weitz and producer Ben Allen (no Josh "Deakin" Dibb this time), they've found a sumptuous musical background for their most accomplished songs. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12518-merriweather-post-pavilion/
