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Animal Collectie rocking at the Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective is one of the most known bands around the blogsphere, with thousands of devoted bloggers hailing every new album either as Animal or as solo side projects (especially Panda Bear’s). A look at 2007’s best-of posts around the internet will quickly reveal the momentum of this avant-garde/experimental/noise-rock trio (a trio nowdays since the departure of Deakin back in 2007).


Merriweather Post Pavilion (titled after the nearby outdoor concert venue in Columbia, Maryland) is their eighth studio album and has been in the making for the past year. The album was highly anticipated after the unprecedented success in 2007 with Strawberry Jam (which marked the switch from FatCat Records to Domino Records) and especially after the solo work of Panda Bear with his masterpiece Person Pitch (which even received the Album of the Year praise by Pitchfork). The album was announced by the band back in October of 2008 and is set for release on the 20th of January (although they have already included most of the tracks in their live shows for quite a while now).


The album differs quite in many ways from their previous work. First of all, their sound has shifted vastly toward the electronic side, with samplers, synths and electronic drums dominating most of the tracks. On a second level, their music has lost a lot of its previous noise-rock elements and it now sounds more like psychedelic (or even sunshine) pop. All these make Merriweather one of their most accessible albums to date. Don’t be fooled however, this ain’t a mainstream-pop album by far; experimental and noise marks are still evident all over the album in a classic Animal fashion. Their new style seems to be progressing their sound into a more mainstream pattern and influences from last year’s indie/world/folk newcomers such as Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes seem to have affected the Collective (in my humble opinion). To be honest, this shift makes their album even more accessible for me as well; I love the Animals but their albums always required far more attention than I could offer most of the time. This one I can easily see popping in my playlist much more often than previous records and this is (or seems to be) a definite plus. Along with Franz Ferdinand’s release, it seems that Domino Records are embracing 2009 with quite a handful of pleasant surprises, with Merriweather Post Pavilion certainly being one of those.

PS. I just saw this unofficial (crappy) video to the new track My Girls, only to remember that I had uploaded this track on YouTube back in November after their live here in Athens. You can find the video here in the usual awful quality


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Athens66 started off as a common project by a bunch of friends but quickly turned into almost a personal blog (although some remains of previous posts can still be found). Currently, the Team has been narrowed down to two members, who besides being old friends and schoolmates share the same joy for Music, Movies, Alcohol and Pro Evolution sessions.

The sole purpose of this blog is to shout out whatever comes in mind about movies, music, reality, fantasy and all the rest. Nothing posted here is to be taken seriously, but then again what is? Since this blog is still quite fresh, we are definitely open to suggestions and directions (although most of them will just be ignored)

Team Members

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