Animal Collective

Before listening to Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective leave all your pre-conceived notions of conventional enjoyment at the front desk. They'll give you a little tag with a number 'pon it.

Merriweather Post Pavillion. This name itself reminds me of my youth and faintly evokes the smell of wintergreen on cold winter mornings. The first time I heard this album I became disoriented and thought it actually was my youth come a knocking. Relieved, I realised that I'd been drinking heavily. 

I came to Animal Collective by way of, band member, Panda Bear whose 2007 album Person Pitch is a big favourite in my house so long as I'm the only one in it.

The two albums are similar in that they share a definite Beach Boys sound underpinned by a general discord and seeming cacophony that soon make them sound absolutely nothing like the Beach Boys. There's something very unsettling about this music. 

It reminds me of Richard Yates great book Revolutionary Road. The book of the film. On the face of it all is swell in suburbia as your beautiful young wife hands you the first martini of the day and kisses you gently on the mouth. But, even as she shoos the kids outside and asks you how your day was, you can feel the first little sulphuric, argumentative bubbles inexplicably rising. Nothing is ever quite as it seems. Read the book. You might enjoy it but it's certainly no fun at all.

Similarly, Merriweather Post Pavillion starts in the brightest of moods and you allow yourself to be swept along by the dreamiest of melodies only to be rudely awakened by a dozen competing alarm clocks jolting you into the first Monday of the year. It's a school day and you have a shocking hangover. 

Next, you're chilling out to a soothing, repetitive sound scape allowing yourself to believe that the chaos in your ears is organised and you're making sense of it all finally. But then the chaos moves on apace, mutates and you have to learn to stop worrying and love that now.

Merriweather Post Pavillion is a deeply complex, experimental but ultimately rewarding album. It's the red-headed step child of Revolutionary Road. 

You enter that place full of high hopes and energy.  You emerge tired, battered but relatively happy. What choice do you have?