who are the 3 extra guys behind them, and how have they managed to look even more annoying than the band members?
A new generation of Animals!
Oh AS IF Iām reading that. Christ.
Theyāre either the marine biologists, or the film-makers, with whom they collaborated on this album.
I couldnāt make it through Painting With. Too irritating.
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A lot of people seem to dislike that one. I canāt understand it - I find it VERY compelling! But as I said above, Iām pretty far gone.
Think I just went off them a bit a few years ago and Iām not entirely sure why. Just started finding them quite annoying. Strawberry Jam is still good though
Think the last two albums were so annoying itās retrospectively discoloured some of their best stuff for me, which is a shame. Loved everything up to and including Merriweather Post Pavilion but I donāt think that album ages very well tbh.
Really like No More Runnin still tbh. That terrible NME review makes the new one sounds like a collagey album in that ilk though, which could be up my street.
Not listened to Strawberry Jam in years and years. Interested to see how Iād find it now. Remember loving how abrasive the production was when I was 17 but I could see it grating now. Might blast For Reverend Green and see
Hot take: In hindsight I think Spirit Theyāre Gone Spirit Theyāve Vanished is both their best album and their lightning in a bottle genius moment. Think it might well end up out living the rest of their catalogue
Meant to say What Would I Want Sky? especially is a bloody incredible song and still holds up well
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Now thereās a properly hot take
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What Would I Want Sky was great but otherwise i think that EP marked the point where i started losing interest. fucking panpipe solo.
think it was a few months ago i listened and still thought it was decent
been meaning to dig out my copy of Feels. always found half of it great and half of it boring (the dreary ones like Bees). can think of 4 tracks iād still enjoy but i imagine The Purple Bottle will annoy the fuck out of me now.
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itās funny that in the mid-to-late 00s before iād really gotten into them they seemed to me to be the epitome of cool, as in a proper cool cult band that you only heard about online and felt very out there and experimental.
now a lot of their stuff feels to me like irritating hippy nerds trying too hard.
i think it was starting to experience a lot of their diehard american fans on the internet that started to shift my perspective and how i viewed the music.
Didnāt ever really enjoy their early work aside from some of the stuff on Spirit. Think they became a great band when they embraced a melodic sound with more traditional song structures.
That run through S Tong > Feels > S Jam > MPP was a genuinely exciting time watching them develop and gain more attention. It kind of felt like they were the most of the moment progressive and exciting band and Iād still have Banshee Beat and Fireworks fairly high up in a top 20 songs of the 00s list. Obviously in the cold light of day something like MPP didnāt deserve the 9.6 it got from PF, but itās kind of understandable as I think a lot of people really didnāt want the ball stop rolling and it was great/weird to see a record like that in the recommended section of my local HMV.
However, I thought Centipede Hz and Painting With were both poor records, and I think itās that (more than any issues with their overall sound not dating well) which has impacted most on their current status. CHz especially sounds the most like the outward aesthetic theyād projected (overgrown skater boy pretending to be on hard drugs) and that iād always been happy to overlook because there was a depth to their music that made it more than just āwanky hippie stuffā.
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Think you need the experimental stuff to explain the lure of Animal Collective in the 00s. You hear an album like Spirit and you hear an interesting and pretty unique combination of noise and folk music, but also great pop sensibilities underneath.
Thereās sometimes this mystique with indie/alternative bands ā the idea that a band could make a or the great pop album if they wanted to. With Animal Collective you got to see them peel back the layers and embrace those melodic sounds, traditional song structures and pop music in general. And succeed in it, and become pretty huge in the process.
For anyone whoād been following AC for a while, MPP was such an exciting moment, because it was a kind of reveal. The hype surrounded the arrival of pop music shaped in ACās image. I remember being hungover at uni and watching CDUK or whatever the equivalent was on kids TV at that time and them playing the My Girls video and being mindblown that this was the same band as those noisy folk records that had pretty much got me into avant-garde music for the first time.
In the end, the reality couldnāt quite live up to the promise. Merriweather is a good record, but nothing truly ground breaking. They can be pretty fucking annoying. They were massively open to parody and derision - like the whole of twee indie pop really, it went mainstream, then completely out of vogue.
The 3 year gap was waaaay too long for a band celebrated for its prolific output to drop an album as underwhelming as Centipede HZ and just fed into the critics hands. Painting With, another 4 years later, borders on self parody and embraces all the twee stereotypes that had become so embarrassing.
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I love everything theyāve done. I believe Painting With is the album Iāve listened to the most, and I really cannot see how anyone who likes MPP cannot like Centipede Hz. Iām one of those fans. AMA.
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Centipede Hz is AC running out of ideas. Itās MPP, without the songs, recorded with borderline unlistenable production to mask a lack of ideas and give an air of experimentation. Had it been released 3 months after MPP, just another one of their quirky experiments, it would have been fine. As the long awaited sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s, itās an absolute disaster
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Well theyāre certainly all words. Not one of themās true though. Running out of ideas? Those songs go everywhere!
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