James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
The Christian rock band from Brighton bring religion to the masses.
Recipe for modern R'n'B album: liberal helpings of guest rappers and an overdose of sexual euphemisms.
At a time when their ‘private sides’ have seen them settling down variously in the US and Portugal, Animal Collective’s latest album Merriweather Post Pavilion has seen their stock rise way above previous successes. An underground staple since their emergence early this decade, Merriweather sees the band at their most musically confident, even reaching the mainstream when ‘My Girls’ was named Radio 1’s Single of the Week in March. The Yorker caught up with them on their tour bus…
How did you feel about the hype surrounding MPP’s release?
Geologist: It felt good but people were crazily calling it album of the year before it had even leaked. There’s no need for it to be a competition, but people do like to make it into one.
Panda Bear: Grizzly Bear go through that sort of thing too.
G: But did anyone hack into their email account? It felt a little over the top.
What aspects of your music do you think enabled your shift towards wider recognition?
PB: Our music is kind of weird, but with the most recent record there are elements that are really in line with the mainstream; ‘My Girls’ has an R&B-type rhythmic set to it. There’s a celebratory sound to some of the songs, and less hectic energy than before. That said, there’s a weird combination: although the sound of the music is forcefully outward, the subject matter of the songs is often very inward stuff to me.
What was the greatest influence on the writing of MPP?
PB: The way Jamaican dub music uses effects as a mode of performance certainly had a significant effect on what we were doing. Techno music is part of it too, both the early Detroit version and the German Kompakt version.
G: Without Josh [Dibb, the collective’s fourth member, Deakin, present on earlier recordings but taking time out for now] playing guitar, we lost a huge chunk of middle sound frequency and it got us thinking about how we’ve dealt with different frequencies in the past. We’ve always wanted to do something where the low end was the focus; rather than try to fill the big hole in the middle, we took the opportunity to experiment.
How does the optical illusion on your album cover reflect the music within?
PB: If you don’t focus on the image too much, it can just appear stagnant, but if you move your eyes around, the supernatural stuff starts to happen. I’d hope that our music makes magical things happen in your ears or your brain. It’s in the sound of the mixes: there’s a lot of layering, there are two vocal parts going on a lot of the time. On some songs it’s like there are little secrets in the sound, that you can only find by listening a certain way, by focusing on one vocal part or another.
What attracted you to working with a mainstream engineer [Ben Allen, Grammy nominee for work with Gnarls Barkley and Christina Aguilera]?
PB: He’d worked on music that had featured a lot of bass, really heavy bass. It seemed like he knew how to work with that kind of sound, and that’s something we were interested in.
G: He’s used to thinking about the commercial side of things, so his mixing ideas, especially on the vocals, were radically different to ours: he was always pushing for them to be a lot louder, way louder than they ended up being on the record, but he had an effect.
How’s your film working out?
Avey Tare: It’s been a really slow process but a good one. Almost all of the visuals were filmed two years ago. We write music to fit the video and the video gets edited to fit the music too. We want it to be as collaborative as possible, because neither of us had ever really done anything like before.
PB: It doesn’t really feel like a music video or a narrative film. It’s very abstract.
AT: There isn’t an intense structure to it, but there are similar themes and similar ideas that come in and out of it.
G: It’s kinda structured like a record.
AT: Yeah.
PB: The visuals are definitely of the mind of our friend Danny. The cohesiveness of it is, to me, very much his doing.
What was the catalyst in the switch away from the more acoustic sound of previous albums to the more electronic sound of now?
AT: At the time, Sung Tongs was a much-needed breath of fresh air. I think everything had gotten a bit too crazy for us, so we needed to clear our heads by making music that was a bit simpler. We’re always thinking about where we can go next, and it just seemed that slowly moving towards more electronic stuff, and samples, just happened.
How do you decide which samples to use?
PB: We make a lot of the samples ourselves; a lot of the rhythms were just us playing drums and keyboards. All the way, we wanted to incorporate more organic or acoustic sounding things into the samples, but a lot of the acoustic sounds that we sampled have been treated to come across as more electronic. We didn’t only sample instruments though, we used all sorts: films…
G: …ping pong balls…
AT: …and fans, the outdoors, whatever’s around us. Ambient stuff.
Animal Collective will be back in the UK for headline sets at Glastonbury and Green Man Festivals.
Animal Collective: official website | MySpace | on Spotify | The Yorker album review
You must log in to submit a comment.
