A.C. EPitome

I’ll admit to being a fair(merri?)-weather Animal Collective fan, having failed to gain satisfactory entrance into the aesthetic realm of their first 9 years or so of output –  bands like early Mercury Rev, Boards of Canada, and maybe very early Sonic Youth, being about the only relevant stamps on my passport.

However, I’m in with the outcrowd in saying that their Merriweather Post Pavilion album is this year’s best release. Verily, it is a solution to a conundrum I broach quite frequently w/ compañeros who’ve lapsed catholic on the music scene. They say:

It’s crap these days. All these internet, computer-recorded bands (oops), w/ fat indie promotion accounts, clogging up the blogosphere w/ faddy pastiche. Many cite the late 80s / early 90s as a highwater mark of genre-bursting inflorescence that glowers down on today’s indie output, aurora borealis-like. Young bands now naively mine these rich skyveins and there’s nothing new under the sun.

Of course that is bollocks, spiced meagerly w/ truth. Not appetizing. It’s bento boxes  like the A.C. that demolish the premise. Mixing synthetic and acoustic instrumentation; relying on seamless deployment of loops, electronic beats, noise and atmosphere; emoting circular murmurs and shrieks conjoined with  sunny pop vocal hooks, rice, the Animal Collective makes you think its ecological music is the sound of things to come. If so, what a weird place we will be living in…

Now, I wish it were true. An earthquake might open terra firma and take the Disney Culture Industry down into some sequestering saline aquifer, allowing us all to heal. That’s doubtful of course, almost by definition, since what A.C. does is so nigh idiosyncratic. Alas. Now they’ve bookended 2009 with the release of their Fall Be Kind EP, excerpted above. It is just as good as Merriweather and a fantastic embodiment of EPitome.  “What Would I Want, Sky” samples a Grateful Dead song, channels Mad Richard era Verve, and generally chimes along in “Empire State of  Mind”-beating uplift, since I don’t live in NYC, and I still have to face the day. In life, we can’t all be the Yankees.