Merriweather Post-Pavilion

I went to bed too early last night to listen to this and forgot to rip it this morning. Grrr.

At least until next week, when a whole batch of even newer records comes out!

Dave, that means that Jason Isbell's album is like, THE FUTURE OF MUSIC. Hope he's ready for that mantle.

Yeah, what does that mean? Newest in years? Makes it sound like nothings come out...IN YEARS! What a sad state the music industry would be in then.

I still haven't heard it, but between Pitchfork and Slant (five out of five stars???) raving about, I'm getting pretty excited. I hope it's not over-hyped. We'll see.

I think the cover kinda sucks, though.

It's a pretty good album. Much more Panda Bear influence, less noise for its own sake, stronger song structures. I have yet to check out the lyrics.

Still, it makes Pet Sounds look like an *NSync album by comparison.

DaveB, you rapscallion!

I'm getting old. I've never even heard of these guys.

I got what you were saying, but the deadly combination of the (not even) mildly amusing phrase and the hyperbole over an album that's a day old was too much ridiculousness to go by uncommented upon.

That said, I'll be listening to this in the sincere hope that it's a lot more like Person Pitch and that it doesn't assault my head with annoying, retarded glee like Strawberry Jam did.

Maybe I'm an idiot Louse, but I had no fucking clue what the hell you meant.

Did you mean it sounds different, unique, or fresher then any record in recent years? Because if that's the case, I have a whole assload of adjectives I could suggest you use instead (starting with the ones above).

Neither have I. Where's my hearing aid, dammit.

Huh? It's the newest album to come out? It came out two weeks ago on vinyl. And did you mean Animal Collective's newest in years? They had an EP last year and a full album the year before. It's not like they're the fucking Wrens or something...

I think by new he means fresh.

He says he means that (fresh) in addition to this (new). Does not compute. But I'm willing to drop it if everyone else will.

So louse is the New King of Bel Air?

All that aside, I normally don't quite like Animal Collective, but that album is not only listenable, but pretty good.

Hang on, I'm not as old as I thought, I didn't realize this was the name of the new(est!) Animal Collective album. Now I'm going down to the five and dime to pick up the new Benny Goodman long player.

Yeah. dreary louse thought people will automatically know it's the new Animal Collective. It's obvious because it's the newest album there is.

Ever.

Of the week.

I don't even know why you're comparing the two. Plus, personal enjoyment and the assumption that something will be considered "a major work" are quite separate issues.

There are a lot of exciting, contemporary records. That doesn't mean they're all Pet Sounds.

Was I the one in the Best of the Year thread complaining about how nothing good came out last year? Was I the one telling people they should be listening to the Buzzcocks instead of Kelly Clarkson (as if one were a reasonable exchange for the other)? Am I the guy who consistently tries to establish cred by namechecking 70s and early 80s culty acts even in threads in which they have no relevance?

I'm out of touch? I've listened to the last three Animal Collective albums. I've got Panda Bear's album. You know what? There's much better music out there.

It takes a lack of perspective to assume, based on the limited number of listens that you could have given it in the last few days (or even weeks or months if you downloaded it early), that an album is as important as you seem to think it is.

Again, you're conflating enjoyment and "greatness." I don't think it's unreasonable to give an album more than a couple days to proclaim (with certainty, no less) that it will be considered a major work for years to come.

Will you STOP being such a contrarian and just kiss the ring, Dave?

I listened to the first track of this today and ended up putting on TVOTR's Return to Cookie Mountain. It's kind of a rainy day, and that album works on rainy days.

I'll check MPP out more tomorrow.

It does give off a late period Beach Boys vibe - think Good Vibrations and other pieces like it. Will make a nice summer record to listen to on the way to the beach or out kayaking.

Why do you assume I'm angry? Did I accidentally hit the exclamation mark key?

I have a pretty broad knowledge of music (including some of those very same culty acts), and I find plenty of music that I still enjoy and find "new". Music didn't stop developing after the early post-punk era.

Where exactly are you that this music is forced upon you?

There's nothing remotely punky about her. Musically speaking, her songs have more in common with Boston or Cheap Trick than anything that's ever been considered punk. And some of that stuff's great.

You're in your early 20s, right? This probably means your parents are probably young enough to have enjoyed Joy Division and the Fall when they first came out (whether they did or not is irrelevant). Is referencing 30-year-old popular bands really all that different from referencing 30-year-old cult bands? Isn't it still essentially a conservative move?

So if your concern is stagnation, you're basically doing right by embracing Animal Collective. But you also seem to be blinding yourself to a lot of other good music on the basis of what was done 30 years ago. Which is the same line that I hear from young classic rock radio listeners who don't bother with anything recorded after 1975.

You can say this about any popular music made after 1950 or so. There's always an implicit social dimension to rock'n'roll. It's not specific to the Billboard Top 100. You don't think hardcore punk isn't enjoyed, by some, for the sake of socialization?

Interpol? Seriously? No wonder you think Animal Collective sounds so "new." The other new stuff you listen to sounds exactly like the old stuff you listen to.

Yes, I'm older, which means I've tried to let go of the idea that fanbase has all that much bearing on quality. But I was well on my way to that realization in my late teens/early 20s.

As for the supposed alternate reality of the internet with its "music-enjoying elite," it's kind of a myth. If you're into music, you probably know other people who are into music. It's been quite easy to develop tastes and have conversations about acts outside the mainstream even before the popularization of the internet.

Not really. As with reality, it all depends on whom you talk to about what subject. I don't talk music with my co-workers or most of my family or even some friends, just as I don't talk movies with certain people, or books with certain people. When I'm online in a music forum, the expectation is that the other people there are somewhat interested in music.

This is true if "the real world" = your mom. But the real world also includes people who know who The Fall are and, for them, a name-drop is cultural currency. What are some assumptions you make when you meet someone else who casually mentions The Fall to you without any preconceived notion that you may be a fan? Does that not carry weight of some sort?

Right. Like the Grateful Dead were. Or Pearl Jam, actually. Or even AC/DC.

You've never had an album sound different to you 48 hours later? How about six months? Ten years?

It's like leaving a movie theater and, with absolute confidence, saying "That was the best movie I've ever seen. Undoubtedly, it will change cinema as we know it."

You do detect something unbelievable about that statement, don't you?

Sure, but you sound like a fool when you try to bring the rest of the world into it: "I'm sure this will be considered a major work..."

Stop destroying him, Dave, and let him enjoy his new CD that's 3 weeks old now.

Ehh, I prefer Strawberry Jam so far.

Louse, Dave isn't implying that every band should sound like the Fall. It's like you're going out of your way to not get his point. The fact of the matter is you're being unbelievably rash. It's possible that Merriweather Post-Pavillion could go down as the Pet Sounds day, month, year, decade, ...or it could be just another album by Animal Collective that everybody says "the Pet Sounds of the whenever the fuck." Frankly, getting compared to Pet Sounds is basically the music industry's version of winning an Oscar. It's been around forever and has never been cool. It also makes absolutely no fucking sense. Clouds Taste Metallic was called the Pet Sounds of the 90's by some reviewers when it was released. It's a fantastic album and probably my favorite Flaming Lips album. Nobody is sitting around singing it's praises. Nobody goes around these days talking about Clouds Taste Metallic being the natural heir to Pet Sounds. You know why? Because it's not. It might have sounded new at the time, different, unique. It might have been a predecessor of Pet Sounds. But it's not Pet Sounds. It's Clouds Taste Metallic.

The best thing for Merriweather Post-Pavillion would be if it could escape Pet Sounds' shadow and become something more. Something beyond that. And that might happen. But for you to insist that it already has happened is beyond ludicrous.

Maybe the day will come when Merriweather is looked at as the new Pet Sounds. If that happens, maybe you'll sit there and scream and say "I was right." But you're not right. Because the truth is few people liked Pet Sounds at the time it was released and it took a long time for people to realize just how incredible an album it was. Maybe there was a Louse back in the day that insisted it was going to be the album that all albums will be judged from that point forward. I seriously doubt it.

Also, the fact that you insist on this idea that meeting a fan of The Pop Group is more special than meeting another fan of AC/DC underlines exactly your problem with music. If someone is really into AC/DC and they meet another fan of AC/DC...like...REAL fan...because that music moves them, it's special. It's not about indie cred or what obscure band you know. It's just about how music moves people. You could argue that The Pop Group is better than AC/DC musically. You could argue the opposite, too. But you can't argue that liking one or the other is anymore special simply because one is more obscure. That's horseshit.

I'd like to pop in and say that while I think Louse is making the album a disservice with all the hyperbole (and, to be fair, pretty much the entire music criticism/hipster forums/etc are doing the same), I perfectly understand trying to want to contextualize the album within the other greats in the history of awesome, because, in clinical terms, the album is holyshitomg!!!!!!1!!.

I sincerely doubt there will be a better album this year (though I hope so, because then this year would be like 2007 in movies) and I'm pretty sure a lot of people will try hard in the coming months to bring this album down and at years end, not to put it in lists for this or that, but much like what people were saying about the chance of Mickey Rourke not being nominated for The Wrestler (which is now a moot point), it doesn't matter. This album makes hyperbole and "attributed importance" meaningless. I repeat, it is holyshitomg!!!!!!1!!putitonrepeatrepeatrepeat.

I suspect it will have a sort of Kid A type of reputation, with a lot of people saying its "difficult" when they are sort of listening it wrong, trying to "understand" it, instead of just letting it wash over you and convert you. It'd be a great litmus test, except I'm sure it will be as overpraised as it will be seen as overrated. But again: holyshitomg!!!!!!1!!putitonrepeatrepeatrepeat.

The other day I was on the upswing of a manic depressive state and I really enjoyed the avant-lunacy that Strawberry Jam offered. I'm not a huge Animal Collective fan, but there are certain moods I get where their music feels better than anything else. Of course, I also get in moods where I want to listen to Experimental Ambient Noise, so that's not exactly a great defense of the music's quality.

Honestly, I am looking forward to hearing the whole thing. I like "My Girls" better than anything on Strawberry Jam. But let's just say the seemingly out-of-proportion raves (not just Louse's, but everyone's) and my past experience with Animal Collective has my bullshit detector up just a little.

I was thinking of picking this up until someone mentioned Kid A. Never mind I guess.

Wow, that's some rather limited thinking you got there.

Never mind the fact that Kid A is awesome...

I listened to it last night as I went to sleep. From that shallow listening, I really haven't heard anything that sounds all that different from any of their other albums (though I only own Feels and Strawberry Jam). It's a lot more pleasant than Strawberry Jam, but at the same time there's no song that really grabs me the way Peacebone did on Strawberry Jam.

It takes me a while to warm up to most albums, however, and this is doubly true of Animal Collective's work, so who knows how I'll feel about it later. I'm not in the "pioneers of modern music" camp, but they certainly manage to do interesting things and occasionally use these interesting things in ways that create really interesting songs (Peacebone, Chores, Grass, Did You See the Words?, For Reverend Green). But for the most part the albums are better suited for ambient background work instead of active listening.

If they ever release an album that reigns (reins? rains?) in their lunacy into some sort of pop song structure (like The Flaming Lips' "Transmissions from the Satellite Heart"), I'll probably fall in love. Person Pitch (Panda Bear's solo album) came closer, but as beautiful sounding as it was, it was one-note and lacked the manic energy that I like about their music.

I don't really read blogs or pay close attention to new music (there's too much old music I still need to discover!) so the whole "overrated" thing is kind of a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.

It is indeed. But even if somebody had bad taste and hated Kid A, to just blindly accept after hearing one comment on a message board saying album A sounds like album B is ridiculous. You're on the internet. So is the music. Find out for yourself.

By the way, I appreciate that some of the posts are starting to be about the actual album. I know I contributed to the bitching in this thread, but maybe we could start moving it in a musical direction a little. I still haven't even heard the damn thing myself. But we had a snow day today so that's about to change. More thoughts later.