Animal Collective, Sung Tongs
Rearranging copious notes about poverty and social exclusion into four definitive headings, fending off a sleepy hangover, drinking coffee, listening to Animal Collective on a Saturday morning,

This is a Bristol album…one of those things, those anti-folk, anti-music high-brow lo-fi,
folksy tricksy authentically twisted new things we all discovered Spring 2005. Three
pleasantly anonymous bearded young men sing repetitive nonsense over ukuleles and
wire brushes. Lots of miaows and background noise, running water and whole-tone
scales. The time changes again and again, from a 6/8 to 4/4 and if you don’t know the
difference, you shouldn’t be at the gig, and if you don’t say that you don’t know the
difference, you’re as good as home.

I am writing something else while I listen to this, my eyes are flicking past pages and
pages where words of poverty and deprivation are the most common, while this music
kind of floats past, it’s very floaty music and assures me that everywhere I go, there are
fields and fields and everything is summer. Where the summer has been spent, there are
instead rainy windows and red wine-filled mugs, where we could play music like this
too, this kind of timeless jam (of the spreadable variety), sweet and fresh from the
farmhouse, albeit listened to increasingly on ipods and computers.

The layers and layers of ragged voices, the booming bass drums, the harmonies and counterpoints. This is a gingham-wearing lullaby of tolerance and benign pot-smoking, warm ale and tea, a degree certificate held dustily on the shelf and a job packing boxes or designing killer microbes to defeat fundamentalists, a kitkat from a Tesco lunchbox (bought in a multi-buy) with a sense of guilt of globalisation. The music really does become people you know who listen to it. The voices are backwards, then correct. I do like this, but in a way I feel like I haven’t really heard anything, this is music rather than songs, landscapes again, sounds blown like bubbles rather than stacked like bricks.

I’m reminded of a comment on TS Eliot’s essay on tradition and talent… some-one in the Guardian today was writing about Eliot, and in discussing Eliot’s anti-Romantic stance (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was suspicious of Romanticism, something I’ll admit to sharing with him…), and said that Eliot espoused a certain kind of professionalism towards the act of creating, rather more than the art; that the objective was to create some thing rather than voicing whims and moods, otherwise every football fan, religious fanatic, or anyone with a grudge or desire could legitimately call themselves artists. I think that’s what I’ve been kind of alluding to, with my rants about faux-authenticity, and new amateurism. Although a lot of the Animal collective stuff here is (very definitely) constructed as opposed to happened upon, it seems to be playing with a riff…it’d be fun actually to study riffs and their evolution, and where the difference between a tune and a riff and a hook lies, because I’m, sure it’s not just semantics. Chance or structure, mouthpiece or architect, inclusion or exclusion and why is always one or the other?