"down there"

Sooo Avey Tare's new album Down There is out. I had a weird cycle of hype for this album. The last few Animal Collective and such albums - Strawberry Jam, Person Pitch, the EPs and especially Merriweather Post Pavilion I got myself good and hyped for. I like looking forward to their releases, they never disappoint, and, more importantly, they're never at all what I was expecting. The more I tried to guess what the new album would be, the more I would be wrong, and the defiance of expectations only added to the joy of that first listen. Plus, they usually leak out quite nicely with live demos and snippets and such, and there's always this air of mystery of, is this leak fake or not? Who has the album, is it on collectedanimals or one of their secret spinoffs? Who knows?

Merriweather Post Pavilion was the best. I mean, any time back in high school I was doing so little that I could focus a lot of my energy on being excited about a new album coming out, but MPP was due to leak during Christmas Break, and I had nothing to do but sit there mashing F5 on a few sites, listening to the tracks that had leaked on repeat. Good times. Nowadays I simply don't have time to get excited about such things, and when I do, it's just a weird burst of obsessive reloading and IRC lurking and such before I give in, realizing that when it leaks, it can wait for a few minutes. This feels an awful lot like maturity, and it sickens and terrifies me.

Anyways, what I can still do is totally obsess over an album once it has come out, and the timing of this one is actually pretty bad. I mean, there's dozens of albums I've been meaning to listen to, the most recent and immediate being Kno's new album, but first the new Sufjan Stevens unexpectedly plowed through them, and now this. I've only heard Down There twice now, but I'm really "digging it", and I don't expect I'll want to listen to much else any time soon.

Anyways, just wanted to give y'all the heads up about that. You can hear the album here, if you'd like. I'll talk about it more later, I think.