Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

The album begins with sound of a jet engine fading into the distance. Liftoff, I suppose, which on the opening track of an album, you might expect to lead to something with umph. Rather as the engine fades away, in comes a subtle, eerie guitar line reminiscent of Wall-era Pink Floyd. In fact, you can half imagine Roger Waters singing the opening lines.

A dancer who was high in a field from a moment
Caught my breath on my way home
Couldn’t stop that spinning force

Yet like most of this album, you're never quite where you think you are and you're almost certainly not headed where you thought you might be going. Soon, the song takes on a marching bounce and the Floyd nod is long forgotten.

This is the enigma that is Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that took me a full week of steady listening just to begin to crack. The problem is, this album is so dense and precise that you feel the songwriters go to great pains to imply destinations at which you'll never arrive. The crescendos never quite reach the pinnacles you imagine. When you expect a heavy bass line, it never comes. When you expect a peak, you get a drop and a breakdown. It never quite lets you get comfortable enough to anticipate.

And yet, despite all that, you keep listening. You don't dare stop, because there's so much going on, that there's always something new you haven't yet heard. You haven't noticed it. That is the type of fascinating work we're discussing.

Now, I'm a listener that likes to interact with music. I like to sing along. I like to drum along. I've been known to play air guitar, keyboards, sax and even violin. On Merriweather Post Pavilion, it wasn't until after I accepted that my karaoke and air skills weren't needed that I began to enjoy the music. Frankly, it wasn't until I stop trying to think through the music and relate it to everything I've ever heard before, that I could begin to understand that I was hearing that rarest of creations: something new.

The fact is, the only way you can break this code is to just let it wash over you. There are so many competing sounds, wooshing, churning, screaming and whizzing by you at all times. On top of that, Panda Bear and Avey Tare's singing serves more as a lead instrument than a means to deliver a message. Their lyrics are fine, don't get me wrong, but the the way they play off each other, singing in tandem and in trade is a key factor in what keeps this album interesting. Neither has a killer voice, but like everything else on this album, their notes always seem perfectly in place. They'll bridge notes and fade in and out, but never haphazardly. Always with purpose.

So after all of that, I'm still a bit unsure what I think of this album. It is an excellent creation of music. I can say that without hesitation. But I can't say I love it. It's just not my style. I'm impressed by it and I've enjoyed listening to it, but I don't feel the type of connection to it that I look for in my favorite music. But that's merely my impression. I can't tell you what you'll think of it, but I do encourage you to find out. And when you do, come back and tell us in the comments section.