Animal Collective — “My Girls” — Merriweather Post Pavilion
Well, this finally came out. Yes, it’s great. Like a parallel universe Brian Wilson stepped off a Venusian spaceship wearing fourteen Algonquin headdresses, whatever thoughtless name check-cum-lazy metaphor you want to use. But you still can count me among the few music bloggers who think Animal Collective fans need to calm the fuck down. AC are hard to beat for bells’n’whistles avant-pop, true, but they ain’t reinventing sound as we know it. Their live show can dazzle, but it’s just as often a technical and aggressive disaster. Even in their home base of Baltimore, there are acts more experimental (Videohippos), confrontational (Wilderness) and hyperkinetically, savagely fun (Girl Talk, Dan Deacon). Animal Collective, I’d venture, succeed as jacks of all these trades and masters of none, but the polymath trait is so rare in bands that we get vague allusions to some genius hive mind music messiah. I don’t hate on things for being popular; I’ll gladly tear smug contrarians to pieces for that, and my tastes can certainly veer towards common denominator trash. So I want to go on the record as saying Animal Collective are a prodigiously talented bunch, manage to show some restraint on this pristine tropical storm of a track, hitting a row of payoffs like so many shooting gallery ducks, and keep a half-dozen plates spinning the whole time. All I ask is, if you love an album, just say you love it. And before you call something “ahead of its time,” ask yourself: Can something be ahead of its time if it’s this popular right now?
