Ladies and gentlemen, The BIG CHEESE of 2009!
01
My Girls ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Glucose-drenched acid-sonics - and something of a hit.
For nearly six minutes it teetered on the edge of Frankie Knuckles’ classic ‘Your Love’ (also the base for the much-covered ‘You Got The Love’), but teasingly never quite dived in. Plus the gradual realisation that the “I just want four walls and adobe slabs” lyrics were a paternal rumination over the housing conditions of Noah Lennox’s ‘…Girls’ showed a more human, emotional side to the band.
For the majority of this decade, Animal Collective have been breaking down barriers and reinventing their musical identity, inspiring and cultivating a legion of fans. These nearly-obsessive fans broke out in hysteria when word that Merriweather Post Pavilion finally leaked. “My Girls” was my first taste of the album and what a taste it was. It had the usual bleeps and blips, but also melodies to sing along with, beats to bop your head to, simple lyrics with deeper meaning. The message is transcendent and timeless, the music is entirely modern and original.
Animal Collective created a track that could be played to dance-happy teens as easily as it could be played to awkwardly standing-still 40-somethings. A song that could be blasted from car speakers on a hot summer day or listened to softly on headphones on a rainy one. A song that could be felt, shared, experienced. “My Girls” is a musical masterpiece, an underwater voyage (true to the album’s concept and the music video) : it’s the perfect gateway into Animal Collective’s expansive musical collection.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zol2MJf6XNE
Leaked in late 2008, right in the middle of an ongoing economic meltdown, "My Girls" was perfectly of its moment, decrying materialism for simpler joys: "I don't need to seem like I care about material things like social status/ I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls!" They don't sing those lines; they exclaim them amid a whirl of synth beeps and sine waves that started from chaos and coalesced into an exuberant stomp.
Panda Bear's promise to provide a proper house for his wife and young daughter, in the wake of his father's death-- "But to provide for mine who ask, I will, with heart, on my father's grave," he pledges-- yielded a blissful, near-ecstatic song that practically requires participation, be it hollering along (try to keep yourself from yelling a synchronized "ooooh!" after the chorus) or shimmying in your subway seat. Panda Bear and Avey Tare's harmonies here are warmer (and groovier) than most anywhere else in the band's catalogue, and the electronics are gentle and buoyant; in some ways, "My Girls" feels like a life preserver for people tottering on the precipice of adulthood. Panda Bear might be apologetic about his craving ("I don't mean to seem like I care about material things," he hedges), but "My Girls" is ultimately a celebration of the simplification-- of desire, of priorities-- that comes with growing up.
It may be a strangely sentimental point for an indie group with avant-noise roots to make, but it also signaled another sea change in a decade full of them for Animal Collective. If previously they donned masks and adopted nicknames to hide their identities, coming across as way too esoteric to play to the rafters, on "My Girls" the band step forward as pop stars of their own making, managing the impossible feat of straddling so many different audiences: indie nerds, jambanders, your parents. They could end up being Phish or Arcade Fire or maybe both, but this song is the key to their future: effervescent, heartfelt, inventive, original, and gutsy enough to suggest that we don't need a stable economy to be rich.
"My Girls" is all heart arguably the most earnest expression of basic human want recorded in 2009.
In a way, it was the song that made me evaluate this life in the mid 30's while determined to pursue my own happiness, the one who left that question in my mind while watching some pictures of good old friends on Facebook...Is it really my time?
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