Album Review

It’s not very often that any of us have the opportunity to step back and recognize that we’re caught up in a historic moment. Sure, great tragedies give us this kind of pause, but so do great achievements. And listening to Animal Collective’s new LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion, has just this sort of effect. All of a sudden, the ferment and experimentation that has typified indie rock in the last few years has its historical marker: an eclectic masterpiece that gathers its myriad influences together and pushes them all in a new direction.

You could almost say that a new breed of music has come to fruition over the last decade. It’s a music defined by an amalgamation of styles and pseudo-styles borrowed from every corner of popular music’s last fifty years — from high brow Eno and low brow Esquivel to post-punk and neo-prog, from jingles and sixties soul to folk ballads and nineties electro. It’s a music that couldn’t have been without the advent of Internet file sharing and a music that typifies an indie culture that has embraced irony and then moved beyond it. It’s a music that is best enjoyed as a series of connections, hints and nods to “in” musical artifacts, a pastiche of sounds that are altogether part of your memory in spite of being entirely new.

Whatever the historians settle on naming this movement, Merriweather will likely ensure Animal Collective’s place in the telling of the story. The album isn’t some ivory tower experiment, either. Though it is just as brave and challenging as last year’s Strawberry Jam, this is an entirely approachable, almost pop-oriented record that has the potential to cross over to mainstream audiences without losing its hipster street cred.

“In the Flowers” begins with a chugging dancefloor sample before spilling over into an atmospheric meditation that suddenly explodes into carnival and arcade noise. Mechanical clicks and chimes keep rhythm with a deep bass fuzz. But over all this, a sugar-coated harmony takes precedence in a way that is unfamiliar to Animal Collective fans. This type of alchemy is brought to a new peak on the album’s second track, “My Girls,” with its mixture of 80s Tangerine-Dream-style synth riffs, syncopated rhythm, and a chant-like vocal that follows unexpected melodic intervals. By about midpoint, it becomes apparent Animal Collective has in no way ignored the progress of hip-hop and pop recordings. “My Girls” builds into a sort of inverted top-20 hit, replete with shimmering surfaces and late-night dance-floor beats. “Also Frightened” opens with a kind of Martin Denny exotic background, adding to this the slow rowboat tune itself.

Listen to “In the Flowers”
Listen to “My Girls”

The album really hits a long stride with song four, however, “Summertime Clothes,” suspect number one for a radio crossover. Here the new harmonics of the group reach a Zombies/Beach Boys level, even as they bring in firecracker noises, toy piano synths, watery hand-claps and everything else to construct one of the more complex pop songs imaginable. The upbeat, good-time lyrics here point to the central change in Animal Collective’s composition style: the avant-garde can now make tunes to sing in your head on a perfect summer day. This is followed by “Daily Routine,” a deep breakbeat (and then late-night trance) track that has been seized by Wendy Carlos-style synth trills and a composition that is as jarring and multifaceted as a broken mirror.

Listen to “Summertime Clothes”
Listen to “Daily Routine”

The high point for me comes with “Bluish,” a dreamily futuristic love song that constructs the type of full spatial experience rarely found outside Eno’s Another Green World. Listen to this one first, with headphones, and let me know if that chorus has some kind of psychoactive drug in it. If not, then this is songwriting at a level we’re not supposed to hear.

Listen to “Bluish”

Merriweather pushes on with the mantra-like “Guys Eyes” and the philosophy-paper-turned-melody “Taste,” a meditation on the meaning of the self in a material world troubled by ‘80s video game effects and a slogging mechanical rhythm. The didgeridoo campsong “Lion in a Coma” takes equal parts sideline cheer and synthpop to fill out its strange composition. This is followed by the quiet, folksy “No More Runnin,” and the upbeat singalong “Brothersport,” which closes the album with a trance-tinged climax that circles back to its atmospheric opening.

Listen to “Taste”
Listen to “Brothersport”

There’s really no doubt in my mind that Merriweather Post Pavilion will be a benchmark for the development of popular music as well as one of the great achievements of the indie movement. The key thing now is to see how this challenge is taken by other groups interested in pushing the limits of rock music and how listeners like ourselves respond to their efforts.