“Will it be just like I’m dreaming?”

This is the one that finally put Animal Collective on the mainstream map, nearly a decade after they began putting their music out for public consumption. It retains much of their playfulness from earlier albums but strips away the intentionally provocative noise that made those albums so spotty. Here, buried beneath layered and mesmerizing soundscapes are a series of catchy and memorable pop hooks that will lodge themselves in your brain for days on end. The result is sometimes clunky, occassionally feeling like the experimental textures and the pop hooks were conceived of separately and then melded together at a later date, but most of the tracks work brilliantly, and the Beach Boy melodies feel like real unburied treasures. In retrospect, some fans of the band feel this album was AnCo “selling out” but I prefer to think of it as AnCo responding to what their instincts had been driving them towards for years.

Without guitarist Deakin—who took a brief hiatus from the band—the album is much more driven by samples, loops, and synths than Deakin’s guitar freakouts, which proves to be a positive change of pace for the band. The sonic textures they came up with seem to be the result of an exercise in throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, with many of the sound sources being nearly impossible to guess buried beneath a series of manipulations and effects. But those throbbing beats and stuttering rhythms are luscious. Replacing Deakin with producer Ben Allen allowed the band to fine tune the tracks, and the production value is noticeably more refined and tighter than the homespun DIY aesthetic on previous releases. The attention to detail is obvious, though occasionally the endless tinkering seems to have sucked some of the heart out of it, leaving a sunny psychedelic pop sheen without as much soul beneath the surface that is evident on something like Feels. It’s probable—based on the band’s previous work—that Panda and Avey are more concerned with the sonic and formal elements of their songs than the substance of them.

Even still, on MPP the band seems to have forsaken the mumbled nothings of previous lyrical outing and tried to really inject some soul searching poetry into these songs. This soulfulness is mostly a confused mess, but I’ll take “isn’t much that I feel I need; a solid soul and the blood I bleed” over “a peacebone got found in the dinosaur wing” any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Not all of the songs contain such overt social views as ‘My Girls’, but they’ve all got at least a few snippets of sensical lyrics and that psychedelic sunshine pop sheen that makes you feel that the whole thing is either genuine or a very respectable counterfeit. It’s never going to compare to Pet Sounds (but what will?). We live in a different time now, and even if it connects with a lot of people, even young ones like me who weren’t alive for Brian Wilson’s hayday, it’s only borrowing the formal elements of that era and lacks the ethos of it.

If you enjoyed the boundless experimentation on previous albums, this may be a letdown. If you want your pop straightforward and devoid of the gimmicky weirdness that the Collective are known for, you’ll have to sit through some of it to get to the pop hooks buried within the tracks. If you can find yourself at home in this middle ground, it’s a finely tuned pop experiment that you’ll find yourself humming along to even when it feels like there’s an unfortunate lack of substance beneath its surface.

(Side note: the album is named for a venue in Maryland where I once saw Spoon and Arcade Fire perform. My dad came along and became a huge fan of AF in the following years).

Favorite Tracks: My Girls; Bluish; Brother Sport.