Oprah’s Book Club For Illiterate Hipsters

Animal Collective “Who Could Win A Rabbit” – Oh my God, I think I’m going to love this song forever. This is taken from the Animal Collective’s brand new LP Sung Tongs, which is their most pop record to date, though maybe ‘pop’ isn’t quite the right word to describe it. It’s pop if you compare it to their last few releases, which were mostly atonal experiments in texture and form. It’s pop if you consider a warped, severely psychedelic version of Neutral Milk Hotel to be ‘pop.’

As a whole, Sung Tongs seems to be the culmination of what the collective has been doing for the past three years. While the other records seemed to push their interests in folky acoustic guitar, electronic manipulations, and psychedelia to radical extremes, on this album it seems as though they’ve found a way to put it all together with Avey Tare’s gift for melody, which has largely been underutilized since somewhere around Danse Manatee. If they are attempting to create some kind of modern version of folk and traditional music (as I suspect they are), then Sung Tongs is their most successful record since Avey Tare & Panda Bear’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished if just because it’s so much easier to imagine someone playing “Who Could Win A Rabbit” next to a campfire than anything off of Campfire Songs.

Phoenix “If It’s Not With You” – What does this song remind me of? There’s got to be some (probably very uncool) radio song from the 70s or 80s that this song has lifted its chord changes/melody/something from. Maybe it’s a little bit of a bunch of songs? I feel as though I’ve known this my entire life. Anyway, this is the smoothest, cleanest, grooviest song on Phoenix’s new record Alphabetical, which is really nothing but smooth, clean, groovy songs.

Elsewhere: New-ish MP3 blog Cocaine Blunts & Hip Hop Tapes offers “slept on classics” but no “wierdo electroclash shit.” Also, The Gardner Linn Fan Club is posting some MP3s in addition to some strong commentary about comics.

Also: Those of you who enjoyed the demo version of Leslie Feist’s “Mushaboom” that I posted a few months ago should head on over to Said The Gramophone to hear the finished studio version of that song as well as another from her forthcoming album. As I predicted, “Mushaboom” sounds fantastic fleshed out with more instruments and percussion – I’m quite glad that they were a bit creative with it. I had imagined that it would have been recorded with a more traditional arrangement, but they went for something much more colorful and upbeat. The intimate, wintery, by-the-fireplace quality of the demo is gone, but it’s not as though every copy of that version is going to disappear or something. The song has such an incredible melody; practically any arrangement of it would sound good.