In a comment on his Morrissey review earlier this week, fellow Idolatorian Mike Barthel mentioned that his antipathy toward Animal Collective was so strong, he couldn’t even understand why other people liked them:
Why do I hate AC? I’ve gotten into it elsewhere, and yeah, like Maura said, there hasn’t really been a proper platform to air any writer’s grievances at length. I just really, really don’t like them, to the point that I don’t even really understand why other people like them. I actually spent about an hour today talking to a former AC-hata who was trying to talk me into liking the new album, and I gave it an honest, serious try, and it made me want to stab knitting needles in my eyes.
Every so often, we like to take a look at the closing lines of the week’s biggest new-music reviews. Today’s candidate for appraisal is Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, which—after some of the craziest pre-release anticipation this side of a Jonas Brothers album—comes out on vinyl tomorrow:
This morning, an e-mail purporting to be from one of the members of the avant-garde outfit/insane fanboy breeders Animal Collective went out, and the e-mail was a plea for the rest of their forthcoming album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, to leak because, hey, two songs had made their way to the Internet already. “[The] album is intended to be heard as a whole, and nothing bothers us more than individual tracks leaking and ruining the the overall album experience,” the e-mail said. And it was in all lower-case, so it had to be the real thing! Right?
Next year’s upstate New York installment of the… More »
The rise of the artist blog as official mouthpiece in 2008 may have been in part because record labels can’t afford to hire decent PR staff anymore, but hey, you take the good with the bad. And there was a lot of good to come out of artists hitting up Tumblr, MySpace, et al; these blogs were really effective at humanizing the vacuum presented by endless paparazzi shots and press releases, whether through “clarity posts,” in which artists put gossips on blast, or posts explaining what life is like when bands graduate to bigger tours, or just posts about how they liked shoes. After the jump, nine examples of why more artists should make a tour stop in Blogtown. Not only is the trip entertaining, its fruits give people like me great material!
