Animal Collective : Merriweather Post Pavillion

Animal Collective’s most recent album is undoubtedly the most highly anticipated release of 2009. The New York trio endured two track leaks (“Brother Sport” and “Summer Clothes”) and a hacked email calling for a full album leak to get to this point, but they finally made it. I can only imagine the relief they felt when they finally released, according to schedule and in full, Merriweather Post Pavillion.

The album is exactly what you would expect to hear from the seven-record-wise group except for maybe that Panda Bear receives a little bit more songwriting credit this time around. The album opener, “In Flowers”, unfolds slowly with atmospheric dreaminess until it bursts with the wish “if I could just leave my body / for a night.” The track that follows it, “My Girls”, bares the signature sound of this new release as well as a credit from, unsurprisingly, Panda Bear.

Panda Bear’s influence on this album is critical to its identity; each song he’s credited to is hypnotically dreamy and ripe for the (prepare yourself) club remixes of Merriweather. Do I go too far? You decide. Either way, it’s not exactly new territory to dance your heart out to a trippy trance song with a name like “My Girls.”

The album features several gripping transitions between songs. This contributes to the feeling of being in a world caught in conflict between the real and the unreal (“just a signal / in my head”). Yeah, dreaminess and head-in-the-clouds type sensations may not be new to AC but there’s a moment between “My Girls” and “Also Frightened” that sounds like waking up. It dumps you ought into a world full of questions (“will it be just like they’re dreaming?”) and a chorus of “them” until, maybe, you’re paranoid, too.

Other tracks that people will probably be talking about (get ready to hear about them around the water cooler) include the bubbly “Bluish” and “Daily Routine.” Slowly evolving around Panda Bear Avey Tare singing “I’m getting lost in your curls” and positively beautiful key work by the Geologist, “Bluish” is exactly that: a song that sounds beautifully blue. “Daily Routine” finds itself winding up like a clock to mechanical noises and a chorus of “the machine’s working fine” in the first thirty seconds.

I cannot get over how into this album I am right now. As someone who didn’t consider himself “a fan of AC” until just recently, I can attest to how amazing this album is. Though it still contains all of the same weirdness and dissonance of their previous releases, it is also remarkably different from them. I attribute this to lyrics that are less “just strange” and more memorable (“I want to walk / around with you”), letting the listener rest on tiny islands of sanity in soundscapes flooding with changing instrumentation and intense questioning (“am I really all the things / that are outside of me?”).

No matter what you think of this album, it’s not going to go away. Literally everyone will be talking about how awesome it is, so you might as well save yourself some time and learn to like Animal Collective. Like I said, they’re not going anywhere.