Washed Out - Paracosm

Right now, probably even as I write this, someone is probably listening to Washed Out’s second full-length Paracosm and making a lifetime of memories with the record’s gentle dreamscapes serving as the soundtrack.

“They could do worse” would be the old, cynical response, but the truth is that the kids today have the enviable position of having a record like Paracosm spinning in the background of falling in love, discovering one another through late night stories, or even spending a glorious weekend together among friends, dangerously selfish in their youth.

Of course, this is a very romantic notion of what I think kids should be doing with their time, and I’d be more than just a tad bit disappointed if these types of things don't still happen with youth. If music still has the ability to touch, soften, and impact their lives the way it has for me, then Paracosm can become a record of tremendous potential for anyone with a big heart and the smarts to nurture that fickle organ.

Paracosm is filled with romantic notions just as much as it’s filled with youthful optimism. It’s fitting that it’s being released at the end of summer, because memories suddenly become bathed in soft-focus reflection the moment you start looking for a long-sleeve option.  Paracosm is as warm as a collegiate sweatshirt and its comfort may have you investing a good deal of time within its infectious intricacies.

Maybe it’s the weird dichotomy of recently attending a funeral and experiencing the event’s social healing properties that makes lines like “Meet up with the old crowd…It all feels right” resonate as much it would with a younger listener, prepping for the last big bash of the summer. Paracosm is a record with universal appeal and it’s as hypnotic and alluring as any record you’ll hear this year.

Producer Ben Allen is responsible for much of this album’s success, but it’s also very clear that Washed Out’s Earnest Greene is out to make his musical ambition more than just a whim he created in the bedroom of his parent’s house, an outlet to remain productive while looking for work.

Paracosm makes it seem like Greene finally realizes that Washed Out is his job now, and he’s done remarkable work doing the heavy-lifting of making our last few weeks of summer sound great.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion

I was high when I reviewed the last Animal Collective album. Not that it changes what I ultimately thought about the album…it stands up incredibly well...but I will admit that a “higher” state of mind admittedly helps with how the album sticks to your grey matter.
For Merriweather Post Pavilion, I decided to take on the listening session with nothing more than a glass of Cranapple and some residual Vicodin floating through my bloodstream. I’d like you to think that the newfound sobriety was intentional, so let me make myself perfectly clear: if I had any evidence of weed or usable resin to scrape, I would have gladly complemented the new Animal Collective record with a few hits.
Alas, it didn’t matter much. Animal Collective have made Merriweather Post Pavilion user friendly, even when said “user” to let on that I wanted to undertake listening to the new Animal Collective album sober, but the fact is I would have gotten totally baked beforehand had I any at my disposal.
Since I didn’t, the latest was reviewed as clean as the ice that’s currently sealing my backyard.
As it turns out, recreational enhancements aren’t really needed with Merriweather. I’m sure they’d enhance things just fine, but the harsh edge of AC’s psychedelia now have smooth edges and (gasp!) accessible passages. It’s the perfect album to gain familiarity with them while just happening to be their most perfect album.
The accessibility aspect has nothing to do with the praise. The perfection comes from how much is going on in nearly every song and how wonderfully flawless it all seems. Merriweather sounds like David Porter and Noah Lennox came close to maxing out those unlimited tracks on their computer-recording program while composing everything. There’s not only the effort that came from capturing everything, but from the process of whittling down those unlimited tracks into something that you can aurally wrap yourself around.
When you do, you’ll find that there’s melody and playfulness abounding in the interweaving collages that pan around and drift in and out of the mix. This may be the first album that actually manages to sound like a huge endeavor even when pumped through shitty earbuds at 128 kbs.
How they’ve achieved this is hard to explain. Not so long ago, a completely novice music fan could purchase various music loop programs like Acid, choose passages of music, loop them together and “create” a song. More advanced users could do things like the pitch, tempo, etc. and tweak them to a point where it could become noticeably disconcerting from the original passage. The program was a lot of fun and the possibilities were infinite. What Animal Collective has done with Merriweather is use that same idea with totally unique loops as their source material. They then jack the shit out of them so that scratches, bass pulses, electronic blips and other weird effects infect the loop. These loops get chopped, sped up/slowed down, and cut and pasted next to each other so that there may be a dozen segments in the confines of one song. At this point, a collage of harmonies repeating phrases and/or lines of incomprehensible lyrics are added on top of everything. How they make it work is beyond me, but it’s unlike anything you’ve heard before and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll hear such schizophrenic soundscapes sound this great.
Merriweather Post Pavilion is an album that grows with each listen, and with so much going on in between your ears, you’ll discover new moments each time. It may take some time to fully appreciate AC’s genius that they’ve obviously sweated over and studied for while making this record, but once you have, you won’t miss the herb that helped you realize the band’s other efforts.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

I don’t know how often a guy can get away with throwing around a word like “genius” or “groundbreaking,” so let me just say this before I put my foot in my mouth and get sided with The Boy Who Cried Wolf: After four hits off a weed bat filled with fairly docile Mexican brown marijuana, Strawberry Jam is a groundbreaking work of genius that should be cited as the Pet Sounds of the Ritalin generation.
Regardless of what actually fuels Animal Collective (pharmaceuticals, mental illness, etc.), there is a real passion to what they’re doing and keep up, goddamnit, because they’ve already moved on to a new instrument, rhythm, or dynamic by the time you just figured out the one before it.
And when Animal Collective can’t think of words, they just repeat the same ones over and over or make noises that hark back to Brian Wilson circa ’65.
It’s lazy to regard Strawberry Jam as an “acid rock” record because anyone’s who’s ever tampered with psychedelics will tell you that there’s so much going on at once throughout this album that it wouldn’t be conducive to L.S.D.. No, this is an album that works double-time to reach your synapse, because it has to get through all of the years of dependency and increased tolerance.
Besides, there are moments of real terror and tension around every corner of Strawberry Jam. Dynamics change, suddenly, jumping from a cute falsetto into a bloodcurdling scream while distorted guitars and vintage synthesizers pop in and out of the mix with precise intentions. I have three words of warning to anyone considering dropping some paper with Strawberry Jam as the soundtrack in the background: Art Linkletter’s daughter.
This is the perfect album after indulging in your favorite prescribed cocktail and it could be the album where you can actually hear the joy inside of those notes and forego the need to refill those aforementioned scripts.
Strawberry Jam just may be the holistic ingredient that you need.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch

With major spins on both Black Moth Super Rainbow and Animal Collective themselves, I guess you could point to a specific group of psilocybin eating musicians possessing a lot of my listening time in 2007. Noah Lennox, one of the members of Animal Collective, also received a few spins with his Panda Bear moniker and the recent Person Pitch.
Lennox has a huge Brian Wilson fetish. No really, to the point where he actually sounds like the dude, if Brian Wilson ever decided to create a sonic masterpiece using nothing but loops and other repetitive patterns.
As nice as the nostalgia sounds, and as honest as Lennox is to the spirit of Brian Wilson, something’s too easy about the method he’s chosen here. Not so much with the vocal arrangements, those are top notch throughout Person Pitch, but with the idea that loops, prerecorded bits of musical material, are the foundation of the album’s entire sonic direction.
He comes close with achieving such lofty goals, namely on the twelve minute plus “Good Girl/Carrots,” which slowly transforms itself into more than a few wonderful directions. With a few more songs like this, we may have indeed found a modern suitor to the genre that Wilson initiated before sinking from the weight of its lofty intentions.
At its worst, Person Pitch sounds like a decent senior thesis that’s gotten way too much notoriety around campus. But whereas Smile has been permanently added to the reference library, Person Pitch sounds like it could fade into the woodwork when the next batch of talented freshmen roll in.