Pitchfork Exposes Their Biases in New Animal Collective EP Review

Reviewer Mark Richardson is confused over a supposedly “cool”, “frequently name-checked indie band” doing things that, he astutely observes, could be considered not “cool.” Shocking, I know. What’s going on in Williamsburg?

The first time through, hearing “Graze” explode into this weird sing-along RenFaire jig is a bit of a shock. It sounds very far from what we imagine a hip, frequently name-checked indie band with abrasive experimental roots to sound like. And their performance of it is certainly not tongue-in-cheek: They sound joyful, and they’re not smirking. (I’m not sure they’re capable of that particular expression, to be honest.) And thus it becomes clear that Animal Collective, despite having become a certain kind of alt touchstone in 2009, doesn’t much care about conventional notions of cool. If they want to get dorky and put in a section that asks you to bust out the medieval garb and hop around on one leg for a minute, they’ll do it. And maybe they’ll put this song in the lead spot on an EP that follows up the biggest and most successful record of their career. All this went through my mind before finding out, after reading Fall Be Kind’s credits, that the flute sample comes courtesy of an artist whose name became a punchline after an endless run of goofy TV spots advertising his music: Zamfir, the Master of the Pan Flute. Cool? These guys aren’t sweating it.

Really, they “sound joyful” and it’s “not tongue-in-cheek”? Scandalous.

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Berghain at night

(Via Tip Berlin.)

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“People our age aren’t hung up on photos of themselves that people can Google and find, it’s kind of a given now. It’s become so socially accepted so quickly.”

—David Karp

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Cormac McCarthy Interviewed by The Wallstreet Journal

The whole interview is excellent and worth reading. My favorite parts follow.

On the will to create:

I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

On the process of creation:

I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

On finding his subject:

I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

On a film version of Blood Meridian:

The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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“Embury’s six basic drinks are the Martini, the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Daiquiri, the Sidecar, and the Jack Rose.”

—Wikipedia Entry For The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks

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“Diablo’s fixed view was always one of its greatest strengths, as it allowed for the designers to map out locations, pace encounters and design set-piece boss battles based on the confines of the fixed perspective.”

—Sol Invictus on the fixed camera in the Diablo Series

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