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Having given the Music Box set a rest for a few weeks, I've just come back to it while I'm in the bath (at this moment, bubbles, rubber duck, glass of wine and all, like an easy-living soccer mom with her hair down when the kids are away at band camp and hubby has gone shooting in the fuckin boonies, dunno what that is but it sounds like the right kind of word, get the giant dildo out thinking about the landscape gardener's sweaty torso, go for it love, life is the eternal now, you can run away from all this, no more fuckin meat loaf, spoilt brats and husband blowing his load after a minute forty) and Defeat is knocking me right out all over again.
Each section is better than the last. If this never gets released, it will truly be the definitive long-lost Animal Collective meisterwerk. Song For Jerome, Walk With You from Noah's Ark, From A Beach, live Jabba, Sponge Luke, Guggenheim Jam, you guys took a helluva beating!
The sparkling piano in the first section sounds like Kria's ghost playing in my buried memories and Dave's incantation sounds like a eulogy. It feels like something so grand bedded in the unrepeatable weight of time. It makes me think of the colossal Atlas Sound lyric from Quick Canal, "I looked in the dirt and found wisdom is learned through a costly process of success and failure".
The next section builds and builds with the Brother Sport insistent hats and the jabbing string arpeggios. Ugh, I love this part so much. It's blowing away the weight and resigned peace of the first part of the song. It's a reminder that we are still full of energy and joy, no matter what we've come through, no matter the burdens of a long life lived. It's as cathartic as anything they've ever written, in its own way.
And as I said last time I was raving about this song, I can barely process the final section. It's like a sermon. The piano is my favourite part of any Animal Collective-related song since MPP and Dave's vocal is only just behind. It is towering.
Fingers crossed this Kickstarter happens because my donation will probably be my Christmas present to myself. It's a comfort just knowing that it exists.
