Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

There’s a moment roughly halfway through ‘My Girls’, the second track on Merriweather Post Pavilion, that encapsulates everything brave and wonderful and essential about Animal Collective. As the song builds to a climax around Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s soaring vocals, the drumbeat disappears momentarily and the players unite in a wordless yelp. It’s a huge release, no question, but of what exactly? Is it joy? Sadness? Pride? Longing? Lyrically the song touches on all four of these universal human emotions, but this is a moment of such transcendental beauty that meaning is instantly cast aside. It’s one of those precious moments when music becomes so much more than the sum of its parts, and the listener is well and truly moved – in every sense of that word. In truth, this is a band who have built their whole career around mining for such moments, and this, their eighth studio album, is practically overflowing with them.

Just as these moments serve to celebrate the primal power of music, Merriweather as a whole is a towering celebration of life and love and the simple pleasures in both that many of us mistakenly take for granted. Ever since the death of his father in 2004, Panda Bear’s output – both solo and with AC – has taken on a markedly more autobiographical quality, and songs such as ‘Guys Eyes’, ‘No More Runnin’’ and the aforementioned ‘My Girls’ proudly embrace themes of commitment and responsibility that reflect their authors’ growing maturity. The fact is that the band members have moved on from their more psychedelic formative years in rural Maryland, and have recently been getting married and starting families. So, for the most part gone are the acid-munching hymns to banshees and moonlit forest floors. In their place we find a collection of songs (significantly, all of which are under six minutes) that are more grounded in the day-to-day realities of the human condition. So, ‘Daily Routine’ is an ambient, stream-of-consciousness ode to fatherhood, while ‘Bluish’ is the first great love song of 2009.

But just because the band has perhaps moved inside from the campfire to the fireplace doesn’t mean that they’ve settled down. Far from it in fact, and, much like the band’s live show, these eleven tracks show that they’ve lost nothing of their restless energy and spirit of invention. As early as the opening number, as a dripping harpsichord line gives way to a crashing wave of synths (another epic ‘moment’) and Avey intones “If I could just leave my body for the night“, we sense we’re in for the same unpredictable ride that comes with each AC release. Similiarly, just as the record appears to be fading to black on the sleepy piano and doo-wop bass line of ‘No More Runnin’’ – another song that deals with relationships and compromise – Geologist shifts things up several gears on the album’s busiest track, ‘Brothersport’. Old-school gabba bleeps and underwater sirens, anyone?

Panda Bear has spoken frequently about his love of dance rhythms – the sleeve notes on his 2007 solo masterpiece Person Pitch specifically name-check numerous house DJs as influences – and his use of tribal repetition and feverish chanting is what makes many of Merriweather’s tracks endlessly listenable. The fact that many of these rhythms are tied to the best bass lines the band has ever recorded is just the icing on the cake.

Having crafted some of the most intoxicating – and at times frustratingly inaccessible – left-field, genre-defying music of the past decade, Animal Collective’s greatness is finally cemented with the arrival of Merriweather Post Pavilion. As the new year rolls on, the album’s mesmerising cover art won’t be the only thing drawing new fans in. This is huge, important, life-affirming music – a record to lose yourself inside of.