Review Summary: Merriweather Post Pavilion is an experience, an interactive pop album marrying every envelope Animal Collective has been pushing.
In a lot of ways
Merriweather Post Pavilion isn’t just Animal Collective’s “pop” album or best album, it is also the most interactive. The band describes it as music worthy of outdoors listening- or, more specifically, the outdoor Maryland venue the album gets it title from- and they’re right on the money.
Animal Collective’s classic back catalogue, from the frosty textures in
Sung Tongs to the abrasive freak-folk in
Strawberry Jam, works on a larger scale than your normal band, but the music is still meant for bumping in your trunk or under the colored lights of a basement venue.
Merriweather Post Pavilion just proves Avey Tare and Panda Bear (real names David Portner and Noah Lennox, respectively) are expert songwriters, turning in a grandstand of production and editing. They achieve their feat, perfecting a sound they’ve been honing through nine studio albums, and it explodes with the sky in mind.
As an engaging and gripping pop album from front to back,
Merriweather Post Pavilion could easily sustain a club for 55 minutes with the smooth framework that so effortlessly strings together 11 potential singles.
Avey Tare and Panda Bear are working harmoniously, becoming a rock band right before our eyes.
Merriweather Post Pavilion has the breakout appeal which none of Animal Collective’s albums could reach before, bridging together a collection of standard-sized pop tunes that never sharpen their edges or step out of line. It all congeals into a modern tour-de-force of psychedelic pop, tribal folk, sonic electronics and whatever else comes to mind.
It begins with a rumble that ripples right through to the messy stampede, “Brothersport.” “In the Flowers” begins with strings pulsating through water, dripping in gothic textures before the spluttering water gives way to a ground shaking tribal pulse, Avey Tare’s distinct bubbly persona breaking through to deliver each smile-inducing lick of imaginative non-sequiturs (“She walked up with a flower and I cared”).
“My Girls” takes it a step further, building a cascading waterfall of synths and slight distancing to the vocals as the song leaps into its rallying verse and chorus, interspersed with the aforementioned handclaps and domestic commentary (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like my social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls”).
Maturing in both sound and on paper, the lyrics on
Merriweather Post Pavilion touch upon all the corners of domestic life. On “Summertime Clothes,” offset by cheers, an asphalt-ground synth that breaks down into electro-pop beamed from space, Avey Tare enjoys the tender surprises of exploring a familiar terrain (“It doesn’t really matter; I’ll go where you feel / hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal / I point in the windows, you point out the parks / rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks”).
Even as the songs grow longer, the sound fuller and darkly primitive,
Merriweather Post Pavilion rings more emotion out of the tension inside those adobe slabs. “Daily Routine” recognizes the mundane ins-and-outs of an everyday cycle taking care of the brat in the backseat (“What can I do as traffic pass? / Guard my girl from muffler’s black gas”); “Guy’s Eyes,” the urges not satisfied in the lion’s den.
Which brings us to “Lion in a Coma,” the best Animal Collective song ever, tangling all the elements that the band has spread over nine studio albums and a splattering of other EPs, with an elastic didgeridoo that sets the tone for the mystical folklore quality to Panda Bear’s campfire chants, sparking an irresistible urge to move when his show stopping “lion in a coma” becomes, eerily, “lying in a coma.”
Merriweather Post Pavilion is an experience, an interactive pop album marrying every envelope Animal Collective has been pushing and opens them all at once, ending in a euphoric mesh of African pop and Panda Bear’s signature experimental repetition on “Brothersport,” a more-than-fitting closer to the euphoric trip that precedes it.
Merriweather Post Pavilion is heartbreaking and heartwarming, and you can either disregard what is one of the most pleasing, enjoyably rich and rewarding releases of the past decade or rally with the rest of us, and clap, sing and blare it through the earphones on our iPods because, as “Taste” so elegantly points out, we are still all the things outside of us.
