Track Listing

1. Leaf House
2. Who Could Wind Rabbit
3. The Softest Voice
4. Winters Love
5. Kids On Holiday
6. Sweet Road
7. Visiting Friends
8. College
9. We Tigers
10. Mouth Wooed Her
11. Good Lovin Outside
12. Whaddit Done

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3589 in Music
• Released on: 2004-06-01
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Nice
I think this may be their best one so far. As anyone reading this by now probably already knows, the music here attracts admirers through it's originality, sunny tone and left-field weirdness. Leaf House, Rabbit, Winters Love, We Tigers and maybe Kids on Holiday are the immediate tracks that standout. Songs like "Softest Voice" and "Visiting Friends" take getting into but anyone with an appreciation for ambient music who has a few minutes to just turn off their brain and do nothing but listen to the music should probably like those tracks as well. "College" is a track that no one ever talks about but is the closest thing to Beach Boys harmonizing I've ever heard from any of all the so-called bands over the years who sound like Pet Sounds. At the end of the track there's a lyric that anyone can find amusing. The last three tracks do nothing for me, hence the deduction to 4 stars.

Eclectic
Throughout my years of music listening I have come across really weird bands with strange sounds and interesting melodies. Animal Collective is by far the most out there.

About 90% of those who I have played them for hate them. They hate them because you can't truly understand the lyrics and what you do understand is completely nonsensical. Their music is strange and extremely displacing. One song you'll be transported a wonderful world of happiness in the clouds [Who Could Win A Rabbit] and the next you'll be thrown into what seems like either a really bad or really good acid trip [Leaf House].

For those that do like Animal Collective, that is why. The listener is taken on a journey where lyrics mean nothing. It is entirely up to your imagination to make your own conclusions about a musical world that mimics that of Looking-Glass Land.

Animal Collective is my personal favorite band for reasons of their amazing sense of structure in an eloquently disheveled universe.

Listen to them, try them out. If you like them, awesome; if you don't... move on.

Tung Songs
If Mum or Sigur Ros got invaded by a bunch of acid-tripping folkies, then the result might be something like "Sung Tongs," another unspeakably mad album by the Animal Collective. This bizarre little band continues to push the limits of traditional songcraft and melodies, and leave you feeling mildly nostalgic. Maybe a little dizzy too.

It opens with a spinning, screechy noise -- which would seem to indicate hard-rock to follow. Wrong. Instead, a mellow folky melody and murmuring vocals, which suddenly build and multiply into a chorus of creepy voices. "Leaf House" undulates through a fragmented melody, full of distorted vocals and flowery acid folk.

If that hasn't knocked you off your chair, then the following songs might. "Who Could Win A Rabbit" sounds like your basic country-folk song on mushrooms, and following it is an arc of colourful songs: gossamer-thin guitar ballads, sketchy little experimental songs, hallucinatory folk, spare guitar pop, and.... well, just about everything else.

"Sung Tongs" isn't an easy album to get into -- it's all about the atmosphere, rather than something you can get up and dance to. Granted, a few of the tracks are quite catchy, but in the end it's all about the dark, colourful, disturbing and somehow soothing feeling that the music leaves you with.

It also has some remnants of "Here Comes the Indian," with "We Tigers" turning into a tribal beat-and-chant affair. But most of the time, the Collective tries out other stuff, like paring down the music to just guitar, vocals and spoons. Other times it's a massive, intoxicating swirl of rippling guitar and bass, bands of eerie synth, rattling noises, and the occasional sample. What IS that bubbling sludgey noise?

The Collective also sounds more comfortable here, with chipper vocals and lots of handclaps. You can't make out much of the lyrics, but they're more about being part of the lyrics than about being lyrics -- "Good day outside/Tribe of life and mine and yours/You're so good and natural/Arms appeal/Cause your so/close." Well, whatever.

"Sung Tongs" featured the Animal Collective expanding their already-strange sound even further, until nobody could hope to catch up to the strangeness. Definitely worth hearing.