Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavilion

One experimental rock band- a guitarist + a sampler=Animal Collective’s best album to date. Merriweather Post Pavilion is their 8th studio album veering off their usually disconnected and disjointed course and steering toward something listener friendly.
With the departure of the band member and guitarist known as Deakin (Josh Dibb), the remaining members (who go by the names Avey Tare, Geologist, and Panda Bear) started writing songs without guitar parts. Taking inspiration from Panda Bear’s side solo project they used a sampler in place of the guitar as the leading instrument.
The ambient, trippy, and danceable beats give me flashbacks of MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, particularly on the opening track “In the Flowers.” Collective has been culminating this sound for a decade, though, now bringing in the electronic instruments and mixing that other bands have employed where as rookies MGMT have only been at it for a short time.
“Lion in a Coma” combines electronics and simple mouth harp creating psychedelic electronica beats with a cross-generational flair.
The only issue with this album is that if you listen to it straight through you might think that the songs all start to blend together. This is the symptom of samples, because it is less dynamic throughout.
Contradictory to what I just said, if you listen to each song alone, in a mix or by itself each one can stand out on its own, it is merely the album as a whole that blurs by.

1.In the Flowers
2.My Girls
3.Also Frightened
4.Summertime Clothes
5.Daily Routine
6.Bluish
7.Guys Eyes
8.Taste
9.Lion in a Coma
10.No More Runnin
11.Brother Sport

This is the realMerriweather Post Pavilion in Symphony Woods, located in Columbia, Maryland, where the band has listened to music from the lawn and used as inspiration for their music to be deserving of an outdoor venue like this one.