Do you want to know something? The past few months have been a revelation for bands-in-waiting. When I think back to Elbow and its remarkable performance with ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, or the re-emergence of Take That, all grown-up, minus that pesky squirt RW and producing deliciously flavoursome albums like their latest, ‘The Circus’, it is almost sad that Animal Collective should have taken so long (nine albums!) to produce something so special that you just know that the band is going to grab some much-deserved award recognition and make up some lost ground. Not that David Portner, Noah Lennox, Josh Dibb and Brian Weitz (or their alter egos, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin, who is actually absent from this album, and Geologist, respectively) would feel that any needs to be found.

They have always played in their own inimitable manner. After all, this is a ‘collective’ not a group. It defies the bounds of conventionality and has done so since 2000 and its inception. However, from the edgily ‘Genesis-like’ opener, ‘In The Flowers’, to the ‘Keane-like’, ‘Also Frightened’, the Collective trades on a kaleidoscope of emotional energy that is as progressively rocky as Pink Floyd or as grandiose as Yes, while the ‘band’ expresses itself in colourful complexity and a display of ‘no fear’ that incorporates unusual time signatures (a prog-rock trait) and soaring choruses, not that you could ever tell that such a stable format was in place. I have to tell you that I love it!

There is a subliminal calm pervading this album that does not exist in their previous works and it is a sound that will tease you until you listen for the third, fourth and tenth times at its remarkable professional zest. This is a collective that needs to seek no base. It has found it in ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’, whatever the hec that means and, to be honest, I do not care. This is truly great stuff!

Iain Robertson