Animal CollectiveMerriweather Post Pavilion
2008
Merriweather is the soundtrack for the ultimate hippie/ambient tribal dance party, a giddy, freewheeling, psychedelic beast of an album, full of big beats, trippy drones and glistening synths dancing around the band’s rich, reverb-drenched, fugue-like vocal layers. (That’s the album’s equally tripped-out cover above.) From opening track “In the Flowers,” where dreamy swirls of guitar explode into an avalanche of battering-ram percussion, to closing cut “Brother Sport,” whose sunny vocals and gleeful synthesizers skitter across syncopated grooves before mutating into minimalist ambient-house, this is an album of endless sonic surprises. While tracks like the low-key “No More Runnin’ ” are more conventionally song-oriented, the focus here is on constantly shifting textures and moods, like the central riff of “Daily Routine,” which sounds like a bowling ball being thrown for a strike across the keys of an organ, or the moment on “Guys Eyes” that suggests nothing so much as a backwards loop of a piano being dropped from the roof of a monastery.
No comments:
Post a Comment