Seeing as I have joined late this is my first review on here, so forgive me if my writing style is poor but I don't write much these days (only history essays (only when absolutely necessary (and they are rarely of an acceptable standard))), so it might take me a few attempts to get back into this 'writing' lark but I'll give it a go.
'Experimental' is a genre I've always been confused by. I've come to assume that it's just slapped on music that is deemed a combination of too many genres to name in one breath, or that it just sounds so ridiculously bizarre compared to normal 'music' that people don't even bother giving it a name.
Anyway, on to the album.
I quite enjoyed the first track. During my first attempt at listening I stopped just after the opening song finished as it was late, I was tired, and the opening track had convinced me that this album deserved my undivided attention. Again on my first full listen through I thought it was a decent opener and sets you up for whats to come in terms of sound. So much so infact, that if I listen to the first track 12 times and then the album right through I'd struggle to tell the difference. But anyway, I'm new to this genre so I'll avoid sounding like my Dad and claiming that 'It all sounds the same'.
'My Girls', I believe Wikipedia told me, is the first and so far only single from the album, and although I can't see it setting the charts on fire, it's pretty catchy and at this point the vocals really started to grow on me. David Portner, I have now decided, has a pretty unique voice and I think it really works with this music. What's more, I like it.
Having not heard of this band before I was a bit worried by the name 'Animal Collective'. Part of me expected their music to be littered with animal noises. The start of track three confirmed my worst fears. I may be corrected and be told that this is some eastern instrument or something but to me it sounds like an animal, which annoyed me. But once I let myself get past that I found this song just as enjoyable as the prior two. I'm already thinking that this album deserves the excellent reviews its received. It's different, exciting and is making me tap along and smile. That constitues good music in my books, and its doing well so far.
Summertime Clothes continued in the same way, melodic and catchy and well executed. Congratulations Animal Collective I thought, you are both filling my expectations of a unique sound that I had not heard or listened to before, and suprising me by being very pleasing.
The open of Daily Routine suprised me too. Not in the 'pleasing' manner I just mentioned, but in a 'what the fuck is this?!' sort of way. I don't really understand whats going on at this point, and I really am finding it impossible to describe the noise, but I guess it's experimental and not all experiments work. The vocals are again spot on in this track however, and were it not for his fellow band members dicking about in the background, Portner would have created another decent song. Fortunately it soon moves on to 'Bluish' which continued where the album left off before the 'Daily Routine' experiment.
I've realised that I've probably written far too much now and for those of you who have listened/reviewed the album yourself, you can't be finding this interesting enough to read much more. Luckily for you, my opinion of the opening five songs also applies to the latter six, in that I found it very listenable, the vocals continued to impress me and on occasion I was made to wince by an 'experimental' noise. But it's making me pay attention, I guess.
I know I said I'd try to avoid it but unfortunately I do have one criticism, which is that it's all a bit samey for me. But as I said, this is the first time I've listened to an album of this genre (or lack thereof) and it is to be expected that I don't notice the - what I am sure am - distinct differences between tracks.
I'm going to give this album a very solid 80%, and I feel that if I were a connoisseur of the genre I would be able to give it an even higher score but for now, I am not a big enough fan of this style as a whole to mark it any higher.
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