(Untitled)

[alexmacpherson]

i bit the bullet and listened to a stream of the animal collective album - it's EVEN WORSE than i thought it would be. not only do i loathe this with every fibre of my being, i can't hear what anyone would like about it at all. the flattened-out production, whereby everything sounds as if it's been mixed at the same level, makes me feel physically

Comments

[dubdobdee]

haha this makes me want to hear it -- i laboured far long in the avant-garde mines not to respond to "i can't hear what anyone would like about it at all" as a challenge!

[alexmacpherson]

a cursory glance at the rest of the internet rhapsodising over the horrible thing should cure that w/a swiftness! it's not unlistenable in an "avant garde" way and it's not an "interesting" album, it's just really bad in a very boring way, like the BASICS are just done so ineptly.

[freakytigger]

My favourite thing on it is called "Also Frightened" (this is the only thing I really liked, it's just a stoned psych track really). My least favourite is "Brothersport" I think, which has more of the loops and chanting and electronics that set them apart (in an indie sense).

[skyecaptain]

Yeah, "Brothersport" is by far my least favorite. It's like what I imagine Vampire Weekend to sound like (until I actually listen to Vampire Weekend again) distilled into a few annoying soundbites and then looped indefinitely.

[skyecaptain]

The weird thing about Animal Collective, though, is how resolutely they refuse to step foot in the "avant-garde mines." Often their concept of "challenging" really has no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever; if there's a long patch of noise somewhere, it usually leads back into (relatively) hookier waters, so that you wonder whether or not what you just listened to was some kind of (mild) endurance test.

And as I said before, I think they really do have pop impulses, they're just BAD ones -- they don't think about WHY they might repeat a simple vocal melody for two minutes or more, especially when it's a really stupid melody and there's not much else interesting happening in the song. And they smear it all together like you're not going to notice -- it'd be like putting the "messy room" pic through a few Photoshop filters and expecting everyone's mind to be blown.

And I've actually liked Animal Collective in the past, when their infantileness seemed a bit more honest/on-the-sleeve/the POINT. Infantile doesn't seem to be the point of

[skyecaptain]

Animal Collective as indie rock Soulja Boy -- discuss.

[dubdobdee]

yes the three songs i just found on spotify -- mainly kids on holiday -- reminded me mostly of the faust tapes which were much oohed and ahed over by a minority back in the mid-70s (the mixdown was actually physicaly harder to do then, after all) but were never the thing i liked about faust, who also had a mimsy-singing problem and a kind of will-this-do unclarity about a lot of their projects

guess the ancestor of all this was some of the late cage-work (like HPSCHRD) which had randomised tape-collages as site-specific muzak -- they made for lousy records, but cage hated the idea of records

[dubdobdee]

they are weirdly absent from s**ls**x AT ALL

[dubdobdee]

it's an interesting problem actually with avant-garde or pseudo-avant-garde practice, that the initial project, where say the breakthrough artist stopped singing "properly" (but actually knew how to); but people later would just go straight into "not being able to sing" without ever thinking about what goes into the standard technique, or respecting it

deliberate suspension of a conventional constraint can be exciting and fruitful, but over time it just becomes a routinised and unconsidered absence of something that's actually (normally) there for a good reason

[carsmilesteve]

or the "tom waits phenomenom" as it's generally known?

[dubdobdee]

haha well no, i think the artist who makes the decision in the first place will find ways to expand and develop the idea (cf eg bob dylan: whose breadth and range of expression is huge even though he can't/won't sing "properly"); it's people who come after, imitating the innovator, who routinise the lack thoughtlessly

[freakytigger]

The thing is though that the fanbase also learns to tune it out: for me (who is a lot more sympathetic to AC's music than Lex is) the voice is a big barrier, particularly Panda Bear's more forceful vocals. But I don't think I've ever read a review flagging this up - apparently on previous releases the other dude (Avey Tare) used to shriek randomly sometimes and now it's a good thing that he doesn't, but otherwise the vocal tone and style goes completely unmentioned. It doesn't get mentioned as something to PRAISE in the music though, which suggests it's crossed the barrier from pseudo-avant-garde into "natural".

[carsmilesteve]

this does make me want to listen to it a lot more than pfork writing a 9.6 (or whatever it was) review of it did.

[alexmacpherson]

aaargh!

I am more concerned that when I slag something off, apparently this makes people want to listen to it, whereas no bugger pays attention when I say something is great. listen to joker 'gully brook lane' instead!

[carsmilesteve]

it's the power of your invective dear ;)

knowing that i like a fair bit of stuff that you either disdain or actively loathe, if you take agin something this immediately gets me wondering.

i imagine i will dislike the animal collective though as it sounds like noodly chinstrokey w@nkfests, whereas the stuff i like tends to at least be sharp and/or punchy

[freakytigger]

It's psych-pop meets beach boys meets electronic sounds and loops - apparently FOR THEM the new alb is indeed sharp and punchy, but for anyone else it's annoyingly diffuse.

An argument I have heard in their favour is "they have smuggled jam-band tropes into the realm of cool". I am not wholly convinced this is a positive.

Friends, Romans, and countrymen

[koganbot]

i can't hear what anyone would like about it at all.

Is this true? Are Animal Collective fans so inarticulate?

I don't feel required to hear what someone likes in what I dislike, or for that matter what someone else likes about what I like, and I don't feel an urge to hear this album at all; nonetheless, everything being equal, I would like to be able to hear what someone other than me likes and dislikes about music. Is one of the reasons I read rock criticism.

Re: Friends, Romans, and countrymen

[alexmacpherson]

I just don't hear what pro-AC people hear in the music at all. Not just that I don't hear the same emotions or whatever, it's like I don't hear the same music that they hear. The ILM thread is frustrating cuz it has usually-sane people like Tim F and Ronan rhapsodising over it, but it's also annoying cuz a few people who admit they don't even like it seem to have decided that it should be the 2009 album which everyone has to discuss, and a) this means it is constantly at the top of New Answers, and just seeing it annoys me now, and b) if there's a worse meme than "the AC album is good" it's "no matter what your opinion of the AC album is, it's still interesting", which IT IS REALLY NOT. It is bad in a very boring way. I don't want to discuss it, I don't want to think about it, I want it to fuck off and for all their insane fans to get some new fucking ears.

Re: Friends, Romans, and countrymen

[weasel_seeker]

See. I fall directly into the demographic of people who should love AC. And yet, I have somehow never bothered to actually listen to them. This is how I deal with it. Completely ignoring their existence altogether. By now, the rhapsodizing praise means that either I will enjoy it vaguely but find them to be horribly overrated and be underwhelmed, or I will detest it and have to spend time figuring out why. I have enough favourite indie bands that Lex will hate, so I don't actually ever need to hear this. I think.

That said, anything you're passionate about pro or anti tends to be worth a listen, so this may be my first AC record. Bravo.

Re: Friends, Romans, and countrymen

[alexmacpherson]

oh and the pfork review was just the usual overwrought purple prose, really, who cares. haven't read any other professional reviews of it, I prefer to think about better things.