Mike Powell: Forever 21: Animal Collective's Sung Tongs (Pitchfork)
With Animal Collective's warped, whooping Sung Tongs turning 10 this year, Mike Powell looks back on his early experiences with the album as a 21-year-old college kid coming to grips with the bittersweet realities of adulthood.
Though he’s set up with a great foil in the form of the de rigeur vocoders that start the song, there’s something marvelously catchy and effective about Panda Bear’s halftime cadence on top of the mix. His words are chopped into single phonemes and doled out with a telegraphic dot-dash staggering that lines up strictly with the kick drum, as if someone had inserted a period after each phoneme: “ If. You. Lose. Your. Way. To. Night. That’s. How. You. Know. The. Ma. Gic’s. Right." Sorry to slobber here, but the layering of this oddly stilted utterance over the latticework of faster vocoded voices is a stroke of genius, and it’s the kind of trick that makes you listen to this song over and over, singing it to yourself while folding laundry, humming it en route to the corner store, slapping it onto mixtapes.
Steven Hyden: An interview with Animal Collective's Panda Bear, Noah Lennox, about 'Centipede Hz' (Grantland)
By the end of the interview, Lennox had gotten his point across: Animal Collective — honestly, truly, for real this time, OK? — doesn't think about its audience when it comes to making creative decisions. Making music for Lennox and his bandmates is an inherently self-indulgent exercise; the only sin is doing something you're not into. This strikes me as a healthy attitude. Public taste is fickle. And doing things their own way has clearly served Animal Collective well up to this point, both artistically and commercially.
Riff Market: Regarding Hipster Runoff's Animal Collective Post
"You can try to know, and own the fact that there are things you do not know, or you can be knowing, and hide your own ignorance with sideways shots of been-there done-that familiarity. You can understand that shit happens and try your best to keep things together and accomplish something against all odds — YOU CAN DANCE, as this album begins — or you can blow up the hospital just to show everyone that at any moment anywhere, a hospital can blow up for no fucking reason whatsoever."
"get your head out from those mags / and websites who try to shape your style / take a risk just for yourself / and wade into the deep end of the ocean"