"Am I really all the things that are outside of me?"By God, finally a pop record recognizable as such by the great unwashed; that is to say, by the great mass of folk who have yet to confuse Panda Bear with Justin Timberlake, or Brian Wilson, even.
Merriweather Post Pavilion is the indie-rock event of our young 2009, and make no mistake you will be living with the consequences of this record, both musically and critically, for the entire year. Animal Collective have occasionally copped to a straightforward pop sensibility, most famously on the irresistible "Who Could Win a Rabbit?", "Grass", and "Fireworks", but this is the first entire album to push towards the mainstream, to make the "for-lack-of-a-better-word" Beach Boys comparisons tangible within the music and justify whatever reputation for genius the group had yet to actually earn. Songs like "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" have genuine hooks to catch fish upon (finally, the hope of coherently singing along with an A.C. song!); meanwhile a track like "No More Runnin" listens like the b-side to "Dream Baby Dream", repeating a half-resigned, half-exulted reading of the title against a watery, narcotic backing track, crosshatched by a lazy, barely palpable bass figure. I wish I could tell you what
Merriweather Post Pavilion is about, insofar as pop records can be "about" anything in these days of mp3-enforced atomization. My guess is a vision of domesticity, not as an end result, but another theater of operations in which the intermixed anxiety and bliss of interpersonal relations – between spouses, partners, parents and children - plays out. Is our satisfaction ever attainable, or is its endless deferral an intrinsic part of the human condition? Animal Collective don't answer that question here, and perhaps they don't even mean to ask it; the great beauty of pop music, as Greil Marcus pointed out, is that it "says what it says, not what it's told."
