Animal Collective Preview Trippy "Merriweather Post Pavilion"

Tuesday night, a few dozen journalists and fortunate fans braved inclement weather to get a first listen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, due January 20th on Domino Records. On first listen, the band's eighth studio album proved less linear and immediately accessible than last year's Strawberry Jam, and more in line with their recent, more atmospheric Water Curses EP.

Merriweather is the soundtrack for the ultimate hippie/ambient tribal dance party, a giddy, freewheeling, psychedelic beast of an album, full of big beats, trippy drones and glistening synths dancing around the band's rich, reverb-drenched, fugue-like vocal layers. (That's the album's equally tripped-out cover above.) From opening track "In the Flowers," where dreamy swirls of guitar explode into an avalanche of battering-ram percussion, to closing cut "Brother Sport," whose sunny vocals and gleeful synthesizers skitter across syncopated grooves before mutating into minimalist ambient-house, this is an album of endless sonic surprises. While tracks like the low-key "No More Runnin' " are more conventionally song-oriented, the focus here is on constantly shifting textures and moods, like the central riff of "Daily Routine," which sounds like a bowling ball being thrown for a strike across the keys of an organ, or the moment on "Guys Eyes" that suggests nothing so much as a backwards loop of a piano being dropped from the roof of a monastery.

Merriweather Post Pavilion track list:
"In the Flowers"
"My Girls"
"Also Frightened"
"Summertime Clothes"
"Daily Routine"
"Bluish"
"Guys Eyes"
"Taste"
"Lion in a Coma"
"No More Runnin' "
"Brother Sport"

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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