Sunday, December 28, 2014

Song of the Day #110 - Animal Collective - Alvin Row

My singing voice is gone! My singing voice is gone!


Ahh, I think if I was gonna do an award for... "album that didn't come out in 2014 that I started liking way more in 2014", it'd prolly go to either this or Dean Blunt's The Redeemer. The AnCo catalog runs deep, man, and every time you think you've got ODDSAC or whatever clear as jelly, you can go back a few years to when they were kicking out the REAL jams. I have no idea where I'm going with this.

I often think about whether I like this sort of song, what I'd call "order emerging from chaos", better than the inverse. What I think makes it work so well here is that it doesn't so much settle into order, but an excess of energy is required to sort it into comprehensibility - this might be more in line with physics, anyways. I love how there's a huge sweeping arc that takes the noisy beginning all the way through to like, 7:20 in, when it feels like it could die peacefully and naturally, and then it just starts up right again... not surprisingly, or suddenly, but... like a ghost.

And in trying to discover the source of the final sample, I found and enjoyed yet another blog post that aims to pin down hauntology. The way the concept keeps popping up a couple times a year in my life... hauntology itself haunts me. Not as much as this song, though. Lyrics and melodies keep getting caught in my head in bed, or on the bus, or any other place that's more than a little dark and a little lonely. I don't really care what this song is "about", in terms of lyrics and stuff, at least not right now. I'm more than happy just letting it float around my head - dark, fast, beautiful.

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