Merriweather Post Pavillion - Animal Collective

Rating - 9.3

2009 should be a great year for music, with releases coming from Morissey, Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists and a bevy of other critically acclaimed acts. But just two weeks into the new year Baltimore based noise-pop band Animal Collective released what critics and fans are already praising as a top album this year.

The release, titled Merriweather Post Pavillion (named after a large, outdoors Baltimore venue), is their 9th release is as many years, something very few bands are able to maintain these days. For those who haven’t heard of Animal Collective, the band has three core members David Porter (Avey Tare), Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), and Brian Weitz (Geologist), while 4th member Josh Dibb (Deakin) did not partake in the recording of this record. The adjacent nicknames came about in different ways, but were used most significantly in the bands early live shows (they also wore masks at that time), and each has worked on solo projects and with other bands under those pseudonyms. Most significantly in 2007 Panda Bear released the sprawling and magnificent Person Pitch, which garnered a great deal of critical acclaim (Pitchfork named it the best album of the year). Later that year, Animal Collective released Strawberry Jam, an album which saw their traditionally freak-folk sound wrapped up in slightly more accessible arrangments, with less ambient passages and more scatterbrained hooks.

Merriweather continues this trend, and to its credit finds a delicate balance between the wildness of the Animal Collective catalogue and Panda Bear’s harmony heavy, Beach Boys in space aesthetic. Singers Panda Bear and Avey Tare trade off songs like Lennon and McCartney in their prime, and similarly the albums most significant moments occur when they sing together. Gone are the sudden outbursts of screams, crashing drums, and stylistic changes. Instead, there is a slightly more mature, more gentle Collective here, one that is feeling the pressures of adulthood “My Girls”, supporting the family “Brother Sport”, and the just downright romantic “Bluish”. The latter is one of the most beautiful and surprising songs on the album, managing to wrap traditionally appealing lyrics (“Put on that dress that I like/Its makes me so crazy though I can’t say why”) with pulsating electronics. Another standout track, “Summertime Clothes”, captures a hot night in the city, with Avey Tare and a friend getting high (“With a purple yawn/You’ll be sleeping soon”) and leading a grinding bass synth through the warm summer rain.

Animal Collective have been pushing the limits of electronica and pop for close to a decade, and what started as innocently and drug-related as the Grateful Dead/Timothy Leary scene in the mid 1960s is now an outfit able to tour the world and land their album in the Billboard top 50. They are still making challenging music, and more importantly it is the music they want to make. Animal Collective is one of the few “essential” bands of the past decade, and subsequently so is this album. (2/16/09)