Animal Collective

For nearly a decade, Animal Collective have built a myth from music that thwarts both a satisfactory musical genealogy and a single sufficient expression of genre. Even as that myth flirted with self-parody—with the insistence on foregoing members’ names for precocious pseudonyms or wearing ridiculous masks in press photos—the band’s approach to music-making has remained consistently innovative and their output stubbornly unique.

For six years and as many albums, Animal Collective narrated a sort of ongoing insane, half-perfect sonic collage of genre, building structurally damaged and occasionally brilliant pop songs out of hastily-rendered foundations of rock, folk, trance and psychedelic music. Oscillating between the creative controls of the respective halves of its founding duo, David “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, the band matured from a cabal of electronic-noise anarchists into fully-fledged experimental-pop pioneers. The subject matter of their songs tended usually (and, in light of lyrical choice, thankfully) toward the uncertain, but generally shared a thematic convergence of childlike awe, exuberance, and ecstatic joy propelled by a fascination with dynamic tension that can only rightly be called explosive.

Then in 2007, the nascent cult around the band grew exponentially—and rightly so—for two reasons. The first came in March, when Lennox released his third solo album, the sublime, sample-bending “Person Pitch,” to widespread critical acclaim. The second came in December, when the band proper released their seventh album, “Strawberry Jam.” Delivering on the promise of their finest early work—2003’s “Here Comes the Indian” and 2004’s “Sung Tongs” in particular—“Strawberry Jam” was a masterpiece whose dense soundscapes alternately grinned and strained with near-violent anxiety. To date, that album is Animal Collective’s zenith.

The band’s seventh album, “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” finds the quartet—temporarily reduced to a trio due to guitarist Josh “Deakin” Dibb’s hiatus—at the high water mark of their popularity, exploring a creative future that looks beyond the end that “Strawberry Jam” seemed to suggest. The album’s defining force, its sonic texture, constitutes a synthesis of the central engines behind its direct predecessors—of the hypnotic groove-generator underscoring much of “Person Pitch” and the manic glee that brought “Strawberry Jam” to life. The result is nothing short of a totally fulfilling, happily singular statement in their already impressive decade of work.

Like every other one of their creations, “Merriweather Post Pavilion” bucks any easy definition. To be sure, it’s Animal Collective’s most accessible record, but it only invites access on the band’s preconditions—the music never aspires to anything so much as it expects listeners to aspire to the music. Submerged in a seamless ocean of arpeggiated electronic sound, the album affects a reoccurring cycle of freak-pop whose contours range from low-end love songs to psychedelic-dance.

The album’s ambitious opener sets the tone. “In The Flowers” seems to emerge from outer space, with Portner’s vocals fading in and out over various layers of keyboard sound, before blossoming all at once into a percussive, anthemic epiphany. Portner’s vocal harmonies with Lennox have never sounded better, while the former’s impressive range has always been the signature of the band, the latter’s sheer beauty brings frequent comparisons to the Beach Boys in their heyday. And while both voices have always been put to more instrumental use than is typical in pop music, here they have the trappings of true polish.

“My Girls,” the album’s most obvious single, builds toward a sugary, handclap-heavy, altogether nonsensical chorus. Like the tracks that follow, it’s stacked high and deep with keyboard loops, distorted vocal samples, and percussion both various and eclectic. Calling it this year’s “Paper Planes” may be premature, but equipped with a song like this, Animal Collective are well armed for crossover success.

Yet another song of this cloth, “Summertime Clothes,” opens with a fierce, bass-heavy synthesizer and kick-drum reminiscent of the previous album’s triumphant “For Reverend Green,” but quickly eschews that juggernaut’s bipolar conceit in search of sunny pop-hooks.

Maybe it’s this sort of decision that makes “Merriweather Post Pavilion” pale slightly next to “Strawberry Jam.” While that album crystallized the psychological depths of Animal Collective’s music—however inscrutable and contradictory those depths may be—many of the album’s brightest moments still feel relatively sterile compared to the implicit emotional turmoil that yielded fractured perfection like “Peacebone” and “Cuckoo Cuckoo.”

This also may be why the album’s best songs are the ones that deviate from this pattern. “Bluish,” a wash of innocent echo-chamber balladry, would disappear into the labyrinth of its swirling accompaniment if not for the sheer fact that it’s the album’s most beautiful adornment. Similarly, the relatively spare “No More Runnin” is a drawn-out, dreamy moment of calm on the album’s B-side, whose progression of successively hyperactive dance tracks terminates in the closer, “Brother Sport.”

Debuted on the band’s last tour in long form, “Brother Sport,” a distinctively Lennox-penned track, simultaneously encapsulates the music that comes before it and renders it obsolete. In lieu of verses, the song builds up momentum through three separate sections, each with its own chorus, that shift into one another and arrive, from initial reverie, upon jubilant catharsis. At six minutes, it’s barely long enough.

As has become customary, new songs from the band are already appearing in their ensuing tour. This material seems to indicate a more settled, atmospherically uniform sound than ever before, but as outtakes from “Strawberry Jam,” like “Safer” and “Water Curses,” failed to predict the shift toward “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” it’s understood that Animal Collective are nothing if not unpredictable. For the moment, this piece appears to complete the triptych that began with “Person Pitch,” but the eternal question of what they will do next has become as much a part of the fabric of the band as the music itself.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.