[Dallou]

Hey, could you share some AC reviews that you find really good and spot on. Always a pleasure to read good inspired reviews.
(if this topic already exist, please tell me)

Cheers

[lhtd]

Pitchfork.com

[dance avey dance]

Can we call Pitchfork's review of Danse Manatee inspired?

wrote:

"Avey Tare and Panda Bear are undergoing what real psychologists call regression-- that is, a return to a more developmentally immature level of mental functioning. The Animal collective has always evinced a juvenile sensibility, but a line needs to be drawn. There's a difference between playful, spirited getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-child juvenalia and the less wholesome pants-crapping juvenalia."

"Throwin' the Round Ball" (round ball fixation = bedwetting, I'm told)"

So, let's say the ideal of all progressive music is Freud's phallic phase: "Wow, this feels good when I touch it! I'll just keep doing it." Then, Danse Manatee might be located firmly in Freud's anal phase: "Mommy, look what I made!"

[Dallou]

That is bad

[Dallou]

really like that one (my girl track review on Pitch)

wrote:

So, yeah, the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion is incredibly good. For me, "My Girls", the danceable and insanely catchy ode to the bonds of family sung by Panda Bear, was the record's first "I need to play this song 10 times in a row right now" moment.

It really says it all, the writer doesn't try to be fancy or anything. Even if it is not reaaallly a review

[lhtd]

As sensational as P4k is, I thought this 10.0 review of "What Would I Want? Sky" was well deserved.

wrote:

The only thing that stays the same with Animal Collective is change. Even if you don't think they're consistently brilliant, at least they're consistently different-- they have an open-minded, progressive attitude that I find more admirable as their profile grows. Like most of January's Merriweather Post Pavilion, "What Would I Want? Sky"-- from the forthcoming Fall Be Kind EP-- doesn't sound like anything the band recorded before it, but it still sounds like Animal Collective (call it style, call it voice-- they just manage to color everything they touch).

"Sky" is probably one of the more legible, straightforward pieces of music the band has released, and is also among the most immediately appealing: three minutes of lightly overdriven drum breaks and vocal lines dissolve into three minutes of high-gloss folk-pop. The guitars are audible, the percussion is recognizable. They probably could've made it easier to bob your head to; instead, they put it in a tricky time signature that feels like the meter infants learn to walk in. There's something here that reminds me of new age or yoga or the 1990s, but I can't put my finger on it-- whatever it is, it's appropriate coming from a group that has, through no specific positioning of their own, become the jamband for people who profess to dislike jambands.

Oh, on jambands: "Sky" samples-- and takes its title from-- Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" (incidentally, the first-ever cleared GD sample). Considering the Dead are probably personae non gratae with a good chunk of the A.C. demographic, the sample comes as a nice band-fan challenge (personally, I've never been a big Grateful Dead fan, but my objections are musical, not social). In the original song, the lyric is "Willow sky/ Whoa, I walk and wonder why." In Animal Collective's version, the lyric is flipped: The end of the line becomes the beginning, and "Whoa, I walk" is deliberately misheard as "What would I want?" I mention it because it's what this band has always done for me: take a sound and turn it inside out to make something new, but something recognizable, even familiar.

[Dallou]

this sentence is really spot on on the Fall be kind review (Pitch)

wrote:

But "What Would I Want? Sky" sounds as natural as something that grew out of the earth.

[Cussing Bum]

I really like the FBK review on Pitchfork. I was already into the band before I read it and got into that EP, but not as much as I should have been.

[Takyon]

This is a favorite of mine:

wrote:

I dunno. Maybe I'm just a Philistine, or maybe it's because I'm not from New York—which may be saying the same thing—but I just don't get how a bunch of grunting and howling is supposed to turn basic folk-rock into some kind of transcendental listening experience. Sure, Animal Collective hinted that their new release Feels would be more "experimental" than their previous work (though it shares many traits with their last album Sung Tongs). But that, as ever, is no excuse for making a ho-hum record.

wrote:

The second half of Feels is better than the first, mostly because it's calmer. Early tracks like "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle" are so bombastically cheery as to make The Polyphonic Spree seem phlegmatic—and your skip-ahead button seem virtually irresistible.

wrote:

Problem is, Feels fails to come together as a coherent whole. Even as you find yourself enjoying one of the tracks, the next is inevitably jarring or out of place. There's no musical plan here or, if there is, it's the sort of plan that Dr. Evil would come up with.

wrote:

It contains enough kernels of Animal Collective's older, simpler work to please the hardcore hippie that surely lurks inside you. But if you're just getting interested in the band for the first time, you'd be better off checking out Danse Manatee instead.

**/*****

http://www.slantmagazine.com/music/revi ... tive-feels

[jetski]

I really liked P4k's 10-year anniversary piece on Sung Tongs. Here's an excerpt:

wrote:

At first, it embarrassed me. Men who had been covered in The New York Times had no business squealing like infants. But in the squealing there was the promise of a safe space, a circle of protection in which I was invited to experience feelings that didn’t have a place anywhere else. There’s a reason Animal Collective’s music has been compared to primal scream therapy: Both suggest that there’s no such thing as progress without a little bit of carefully mediated regress. At 21, staring down the cold inevitability of adulthood, I not only wanted this but needed it. The loving, demented babytalk of Sung Tongs became my psychological ball pit: A place where I could play, get dirty, and still have a heavily mediated shot at feeling young.

http://pitchfork.com/features/secondhan ... ung-tongs/

I will admit though that when it comes to AC and Panda Bear, Pitchfork will occasionally write their reviews in such a way that it's basically assumed that anything that AC/PB does is untouchable, which isn't how a review should be written. It comes across like, "This new release is good, but we already knew it was gonna be good, duh."

On the other side of the coin, here's Robert Christgau's review of Strawberry Jam. While it's a bit close-minded, I still find it hilarious

wrote:

The sixth album by this neocommunalist, neopsychedelic quartet improves on 2005's Feels, flashing more shards of tune to lure the coeds with the Coleman PerfectFlow InstaStart Lanterns over to their adamantly unkempt campfire. The welcoming "Peacebone," the energetic "Chores" and the elated "Cuckoo Cuckoo" might get a young leisure consumer to risk conversion at one of the grotty neoprimitivist orgies their shows are bruited to be. Then again, the ninety seconds of weirded-up solo organ ostinato that then underlies or swallows three minutes of incomprehensible singing on "Winter Wonder Land" might inspire the same normal to stay home and watch Seinfeld reruns. It depends on how he or she felt about the six-minute centerpiece, "For Reverend Green," where the listener strains to hear frontman Avey Tare rave, "I think it's all right to feel human now." Great, really. But didn't we know that already?

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rs/an ... ective.php

[ghastlyorchid]

^Yesss. By far the best. Another quote:

wrote:

An Animal Collective album could sound like noise struggling to become a song, or a nursery rhyme that had been melted down and smeared across the stereo field. Listening to them was like looking at a mask: I might recognize it as a face, but I’d never mistake it for one.

So relevant to all their music.

[ROYGBIV]

not a legit review but I feel like Panda Bear is the new Francis Scott Key

[StrangeClams]

HCTI review on pitchfork

[El Camino]

StrangeClams wrote:

HCTI review on pitchfork

This and the Sung Tongs review are the worst. Embarrassing to read.

[jetski]

I actually really like the Sung Tongs Pitchfork review. The language does get a little fluffy at times but I like that the reviewer is totally engulfed in the music. I also like the descriptions of imagery, like the creaking woods in The Softest Voice, since Sung Tongs evokes a lot of those same images for me.

Anyway, it's just personal preference. I think that review just resonates with my own personal reading of the album

[speen]

Yeah, I agree with Victor on the Sung Tongs review. I really liked it. The HCTI review is a little embarrassing, but to be fair, it's almost exactly what I was thinking about when i heard the album the first time haha

[jetski]

I also appreciate Pitchfork for pointing out that Loch Raven sounds like Aphex Twin. It really does, after that I read that I was like "oh yeah, of course." It's got that SAW vol 2 sound

[iKahn]

The HCTI one is one of my favourite reviews. Hits the nail on the head with how I associate with their music.

That quote about the masks is ferreal spooky. I love when people can pinpoint exactly how I feel better than I can.

[Bangs]

That Sung Tongs review gives their Kid A one a run for its money, which is saying something!

That's a good Christgau one though, I will defend that guy's reviews to my grave

[El Camino]

Oh god that Kid A review, worst ever.

Christgau seems kind of smug to me, plus heaps of his reviews don't seem very thought out. Still much better than Scaruffi. Mark Prindle was clearly the best reviewer in my opinion.