Sunday Night Spotlight | No. 2

I'm certainly not endearing anyone with this picture

Animal Collective is a group of guys from Baltimore. They're weird and strange in more ways than one, not to mention their music. It's dense and multi-layered and frankly, it's probably the kind of thing you'd have to have copious amounts of drugs to truly appreciate. However, the music is still good un-drug-aided, but you have to be in the right mindset for it, and not expect some radio-friendly jam to fill your ears when you spin an Animal Collective record.

Some people tout their 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion (which has the coolest album cover in the history of cool album covers...it's not moving either, it just looks like it) as possibly the best album of this year, if not the last few years, if not the last decade. I've given it quite a few spins since it came out, and I'm not nearly on the same wavelength, but I can appreciate what they've tried to do, and MPP certainly has its great points. It's just not the kind of thing you'd throw on for your friends to have a quick listen to.

With all that being said, I wanted to spotlight one of Animal Collective's more accessible and engaging tracks. Clocking in at 6:51, "Fireworks" never seems that long, as it just builds and builds on itself, and has a climax that never quite gets there - that's to say, the song itself is the climax.

Animal Collective - Fireworks

All four members of Animal Collective evidently do vocals, so I can't tell you exactly who it is singing, but I can tell you that part stands out the most for me. There's something visceral about the delivery, a quality that's largely absent from most of the tracks on MPP, and which is oddly refreshing to hear on "Fireworks." Visceral is only one way to describe the vocals as well - they alternate between laboured, desperate, joyful and even ecstatic during the interlude, and even animalistic when the monkey and jungle sounds make appearances throughout.

All the above are nice to hear on an Animal Collective track (aside from the fact actual animal noises are present on a song by a group with such a name), and show a more human side that's usually drowned out in watery noises and stuffed underneath multitudinal layers of sound. But don't just take my word for it; Pitchfork listed "Fireworks" as the 35th best single of the last 10 years. And there's nothing weird or strange about that to me.