Album review: Animal Collective's 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'
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With its eighth studio release, Animal Collective has distilled an album of its purest songs yet. "Merriweather Post Pavilion" shines a light into Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist's subterranean world of labyrinthine freakadelia, banishing some of the ghosts that have haunted it before.
The indie community and some mainstream outlets have celebrated the album with Pentecostal-like fever, which is surprising, considering that "Merriweather Post Pavilion" isn't a new sound for the urban tribalists, only the best iteration to date. It shows how far editing -- and a core group of fanatics -- can take a band.
Certain aural tattoos remain on the New York outfit's collective skin. The banshee wails, the blood-pumping-in-the-ears rhythms, the straight MDMA hits of melody, but Avey Tare and Panda Bear dispense with most of their creepy vocal tics. Instead, they take the breezy harmonies of Panda Bear's 2007 solo outing, "Person Pitch," and stretch, break and blow them out like colorful bulbs of glass.