Animal Collective - My Girls

What do mean they're not pastel colored globs in the shape of humanoids floating through the infinite space of a LSD abusers dream and making alternative electronic music?

I remember vividly when my hipster friends and I discovered Animal Collective before they ever really blew up on the blogosphere, coincidentally a word I loved to use at the time. I remember because it was circa 2004 and their album Here Comes the Indian had come out a bit earlier. I remember it well because we were at a large music store and my self-aware hipster friends and I had a conversation that went something like this...

Friends: "Aw dude, check it out, this great band called Animal Collective has a new album out"
Me: "Oh yeah? Who's that?"
Friends: "A very underground group man. I don't think they'll ever blow up even though Panda Bear & Geographer [sic] started it. Too niche. But def worth a listen"

Fast forward to 2009 and Animal Collective releases their Metacritic magnum-opus "Merriweather Post Pavilion" and everyone loves it. From the streets of Soho to Pitchfork circle jerk sessions, Animal Collective was the talk of the town and the blogosphere. My friend was devastated, but I was too caught up in the hype, and honestly, I was heavily fucking with their first single, and in my opinion, the best song of their whole discography. As all my years of meticulously built up indie cred dissipate in that statement, and the final fuck escapes from the tips of my worn fingers, let me introduce you to Animal Collective's biggest hit and one of the catchiest songs since insert any overplayed song by Journey here. This is "My Girls".

Just to get this out of the way, the music video for this song is wonderful in every way that word can be used. Borderline R3AL magic trap shit, feel me? It's like green screen auteur's met up with microbiologists, NASA, the Blue Man Group, the American Body Suit Association, the artists from Adventure Time, and then had the video have sex with a Harlem Renaissance museum to create an orgy of color and shape. Really it's just the band playing their instruments on a green screen, and all the rest is done by some unrecognized chubby 20 something who wipes Sun Chip stains off his shirt while he works on it with Adobe After-Effects. Yet it all seems so magical if you're not a cynic. The actual song on the other hand, is true magic. Not the super deliberate Gandalf the White kind of magic where it happens to click because of a time and place and everything is calculated, but that Gandalf the Grey type magic where even if there's some bumps ahead you know he's just messing around with you and had everything crazy tucked away so you just think you're in trouble. Nah b, this that Gandalf the Grey type shit. Those spacey synths, that catchy beat loop, the way the whole song builds up by adding new sounds and spaces. The lyrics are awesome too. They really don't make any sense, and you can barely understand them, but in another sense, they're totally clear. The song is about simplicity and bitches. Well, girls really. It's like gathering every nice and sweet thought you've had about pretty girls and putting them in one positive, synth soaked track. The way that girls hair rests exactly 2 centimeters above her cheek freckles and how her nose curls up at the perfect point and angle? This song is about that. The way that girls legs have that excellent tone so they look good in any pastel colored hipster pants or shorts she decides to wear? This songs about that. The way the lyrics recall something like a mix of Dark Ages romanticism and Little House on the Prairie love in the context of modern electronic music is excellent. And it's about not caring about a girls social status or what anyone thinks of you two and giving her "four walls and adobe slat". That's love fam. 

Soaked in pastel light and blurry so you know it's real AKA indie cred swag level on a hundred thousand trillion

 It's not like Animal Collective doesn't have a lot of awesome songs and good albums, because they definitely do, but this is the height of their accessibility, appeal, craft, and pure sonic awesomeness. It's nice to see a song like this come along once in a while and make us rethink what we know about music and life, because it's so fresh and well made. I hope to see more from this group in the future, and hopefully they continue to make  awesome music. They released their album Centipede Hz, but Pitchfork gave it a 7.4 so we can't like it (it was nice though). Here's to more years. I'll definitely be playing this for my girls.

As always, please share, enjoy, and spread the love. Peace.