Merriweather Post Pavilion (album)
Merriweather Post Pavilion is the eighth studio album by American experimental pop group Animal Collective, released on January 6, 2009, through Domino Records. The group recorded the album as a trio featuring members Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Geologist (Brian Weitz), with co-production by Ben H. Allen. It is titled after the Maryland venue of the same name, where Portner and Weitz attended concerts in their youth.
Merriweather Post Pavilion
January 6, 2009
February–July 2008
Sweet Tea (Oxford, Mississippi)
54:45
- Animal Collective
- Ben H. Allen
Merriweather Post Pavilion saw the band continue to explore the electronica-based sound of their previous album Strawberry Jam, but favours a lusher, multi-layered production style compared to its predecessor. Drawing sonically from Panda Bear's 2007 solo album Person Pitch, and working largely without guitars, the band made extensive use of samplers and synthesizers as primary instruments, as well as prominent reverb. The band also installed PA systems in the studio in an attempt to replicate the energy of their live shows.
The album peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the US Top Independent Albums charts. According to review aggregate site Metacritic, Merriweather was the most critically acclaimed album of 2009,[7] and went on to sell over 200,000 copies by 2012.[8] It spawned the singles "My Girls" (named the Best Song of 2009 by Pitchfork and Slant Magazine), "Summertime Clothes", and "Brother Sport". The album's reverb-heavy psychedelic pop sound would exert a wide influence on music of the subsequent decade.[9]
Background[edit]
After recording Strawberry Jam in January 2007, guitarist Deakin (Josh Dibb) decided he would take time off from the group for undisclosed personal reasons. As a result, the group went about writing a new batch of songs to be played without guitar. The group debuted nine of these songs, most of which would later appear on the album, in May 2007 and toured with them through 2008.
To record their eighth studio album, Animal Collective sought the services of Ben H. Allen as co-producer. In an interview with the Baltimore City Paper, Allen stated that the band chose him due to "my work with Gnarls Barkley, and wanted my low-end expertise".[10] According to band-member Brian Weitz, while "[t]hat was the original attraction", Animal Collective was also impressed by his eclectic music tastes, "[h]e seemed to be somebody that technically knew how to work in [urban hip-hop], but was open-minded to other styles as well... knowing that he'd been involved in a lot of the Bad Boy Records stuff from the '90s was exciting to us".[11] Subsequently, the band and Allen met over a few conference calls on Skype in January 2008.[10][11]
Recording[edit]
The band recorded the album February 2008 at Sweet Tea Recording Studio in Oxford, Mississippi, with mixing completed in June or July of that year at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia.[10][11] Drawing inspiration from Lennox's 2007 Panda Bear album Person Pitch, the band used samplers as its primary instruments, specifically the Roland SP-404 and SP-555 samplers; of the former, Brian Weitz said "it's become an instrument that we know really well. It's really user‑friendly. You can do things in real time on it."[11] The group also used synthesizers such as the Roland SH2 and Novation Bass Station (for bassier sounds) and Juno 60 (for higher melodic lines and arpeggiated parts).[11] The Eventide H3000 Ultra‑Harmonizer also helped the group define the sound of the album: according to Allen, "those guys fell in love with the H3000. [...] A lot of times, with the piano and acoustic guitar stuff, we would run it through the H3000 and create a pitched‑up and a pitched‑down version and mix it back in so it'd have an otherworldly sort of feel.[11] Many of the percussion sounds were played acoustically by Lennox, then layered and processed through the samplers' effects units.[11]
Privacy during the sessions was paramount for the group, and a significant factor for choosing Sweet Tea. According to Allen, "During the whole month we worked on the album, the only people there were me, my assistant, and the band. No phones or computers... It's a small town, we were in the South, no one knew who they were. It was nonstop [work]".[10] The studio also offered other advantages; Dave Portner felt Sweet Tea was "the vibiest studio I’ve ever been in. It feels like you're making music in a living room that just happens to have a Neve 8038 desk in it".[11] Further, since Animal Collective planned to record a sample-heavy album, the studio's large control room was ideal; Weitz stated, "we wanted to do most of the tracking in the same room as the engineer".[11] On Merriweather Post Pavilion, the band wanted to capture a live sound on record, just as it intended to on Strawberry Jam. However, recording methods for the two albums were very different, in Noah Lennox's words, "we went about them in totally opposite ways". While on Strawberry Jam they worked with a live foundation (over which they added few overdubs), on Merriweather... they "tracked pretty much every sound individually on its own channel, so that we'd have complete control over every sound in the mixing process".[12]
The band adopted a number of unorthodox recording practices. For instance, Animal Collective set up its PA systems in the control room in an attempt to replicate the group's live sound; Weitz said, "since so much of [the album] was electronic and sample-based, we used those PA speakers to make the samples".[11]
Sample credits[57]
Ballet Slippers
November 22, 2019
May 30, 2009 - June 9, 2009
1:35:21
In popular culture[edit]
In 2021, the hosts of the podcast Space Cats Peace Turtles released a "homebrewed" playable faction for the board game Twilight Imperium, a science-fiction themed board game. This faction was titled the Merriweather Post Pavillion, named after the Animal Collective album, a college favorite of the hosts, Matt Martens and Hunter Donaldson.[63] The faction has grown wildly popular with fans of the board game, and has since been integrated into multiple online platforms of play. The faction represents an equine species known as the Darf that have gambling at the center of their culture and possess a mysterious ability to predict galactic events with ease. In game, this is represented by their ability to gain victory points by "winemaking" the other players - helping other factions scoring points after privately "betting" on how many points each faction will have scored at the end of the round.