Animal Collective's newest album makes even cloudy days Merriweather

By Eric Doctor     1/15/09 6:00pm

When Animal Collective released Feels in 2005, reviewers deemed it their most accessible album to date. When they released Strawberry Jam in 2007, reviewers once again slapped the "accessible" label on its cover.Merriweather Post Pavilion will inevitably receive the same treatement, and while the assertion is not entirely incorrect, to say that anything Animal Collective produces is more "accessible" than anything they have previously released is to miss the point entirely.

The notion of accessibility implies a certain sort of deviation from uniqueness and self. Rather than slipping into someone else's idea of what music ought to sound like, Animal Collective pulls together all of the threads that run through their catalog and fully define themselves. If all of their albums through Sung Tongs are the thesis, and Feels and Strawberry Jam are the antithesis, then Animal Collective has finally achieved synthesis with Merriweather Post Pavilion.

The album cover art is a classic optical illusion: rows of almond shapes against a contrasting background, tesselated in such a way that they appear to shift and undulate, making it impossible to pin the image down. The effect shifts our perception of reality by toying with our visual understanding of the world.

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The music of Merriweather Post Pavilion could be similarly characterized. It is simultaneously disconcerting and calming, aggressive and vulnerable. The music hits some sort of resonant frequency and makes listeners' skulls vibrate. "This is not supposed to sound like music," the listener thinks. It toys with our auditory understanding of the world.

But what distinguishes Merriweather Post Pavilion from ambient noise rock is that the layers are complimentary and lush. Unlistenable noise is piled together in such a way that it somehow makes music - and it is altogether beautiful.

"My Girls," the album's second and perhaps strongest track, begins with descending galloping triplets whose repetition creates an almost numbing effect. The numbness is suddenly penetrated with vocals that float on top of the whole thing, but they then sink into the overall sonic texture.

And that's the beauty: the vocals don't distract from the music; they are an integral part of it. Avey Tare (David Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox)'s voices have never sounded better together, and their resonant-but-not-harmonic polyphony is almost another instrument in the elaborate folds of the music.

But even with all of this complexity, Merriweather Post Pavilion is unapologetically joyous. Listeners can't help but smile as Tare and Panda repeat, "I want to walk around with you / I want to walk around with you" at the end of the chorus of "Summertime Clothes," which follows perhaps the closest thing to a traditional song structure on the entire album.

In other hands, this exuberance would come off as na've, or perhaps overly simplistic. But Merriweather Post Pavilion taps right into the core of human emotion; it is a concentrated dose of serotonin, administered through headphones. The lyrics are not complex; they do not condescend.

In the chorus lift in "In the Flowers," Panda sings: "Then we could be dancing, no more missing you while I am gone / Then we could be dancing, and you'd smile and say, 'I like this song.'" The words are difficult to make out behind the music, but they do not need to be discerned; Panda sings with such earnestness and is so integrated into the music that the listener feels a rush of exhilaration.

At 55 minutes, the album is an exhausting listen, but immediately after the dance-friendly beat on "Brothersport" winds down, the listener wants to hit the repeat button and start over. Merriweather Post Pavilion is so elementally innocent and appeals so directly to basic human emotion that its complexity feels elementary. It is an electronic album with a human soul.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is, in fact, an exercise in contradiction. The music is altogether unique, but it feels somehow familiar. The sonic texturing is complex, but it affects listeners at a very basic level. And it feels so good.

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