On the advice of Pitchfork Media I bought Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, their #2 pick of 2004, and while it's certainly fascinating and an example of that outside the box thinking so prized bytoday's business leaders, I'm not sure it's all that those online musical tyrants promised.
Sung Tongs is not so much an album of distinct tunes with easily discernible melodies as it is a weird continuum of jungle noises, acoustic guitar and a lot of harmonized howls and coos. It reminds me of exotic music, hypermeditative psychedelia and that theme song to Wild Africa. I keep on listening to the album, not out of enjoyment but out of an effort to enjoy it or at least make some sense of what I'm listening to. Maybe 2005 is the year of the reactionary turn to melody and I bought this disc at precisely the wrong moment. I blame history, that merciless bulldozer.
Actually, I suspect that Sung Tongs is the musical equivalent of an ugly person whose ugliness so fascinates you that you can't help staring at them whenever they're around, and one day you realize with a jolt (or simply admit to yourself) that you are in fact quite attracted to mr/ms ugly. I'm already humming along to one of their no-note twelve-minute strum-a-thons as I write.
2 comments:
Tracks from Sung Tongs occasionally play on my radio at Last.fm, and each time every song comes as a slight shock, But I like 'em.
The more I listen to them, the more I like. I was in the mood for something poppy and melodic when I went a' shopping, but now I'm coming round a bit.
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