Animal Collective

This is essentially a pop record but very skewed in its own imaginative space. A Brooklyn group supposedly using only vocals and two acoustic guitars, they play strange, noisy and experimental rock. Sounds of warped or degrading children’s music box melodies are throughout the music. Residing in dreamy, weird little world that songs come out of, reminding one of fairy tales, tiny adventures of youth that delight in odd atmospheres. And beautiful little melodic lullabies creep into the disorder that many of the tracks exist in. Most of the songs are slightly different from one another and would fit comfortably into contrasting genres. But amid all this strangeness it still is a pop/rock record, it’s just very "out there.” Being a double CD release, it contains two of the band’s albums, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Danse Manatee. The CDs differ in the sense that the second one, Danse Manatee, has a more experimental, less pop feel, with beat-less, unstructured passages, but still having a similar emotion and style to the first CD. Interesting and intoxicating music for one’s mind.