Were the seeds of a potential Animal Collective backlash sewn at the band's ambient Saturday evening Lollapalooza set? I like the band well enough, but I found the half hour I caught fairly insufferable. Other critics concur, even ones unabashed about their Animal Collective fandom. The Chicago Tribune called their set "heavy on repetitive beats and monotonous keyboard noodling. Wh...

As Nirvana's legacy can attest, sometimes the best bands can inspire the worst music. It's with that in mind that I listen to Blind Man's Colour, a vile Florida duo that does for Animal Collective what Robbers on High Street did for Spoon: pillage their playbook and reduce it to shtick. All the Merriweather Post Pavilion-isms are there and magnified four-fold: the braying, blurting sounds; the twi...

Now I'm not saying I dislike the Dirty Projectors' lauded new album Bitte Orca. But I will say that halfway through the album, the group's chirping, incessant backing singers hit a note so shrill that I literally ripped off my headphones on impulse. I've heard fire alarms with more grace. So why won't I just come out and say I dislike the new Dirty Projectors album when, well, I clearly do? ...

The unanimous praise for Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest, released today after months of Internet hype, quickly brings to mind the fervor over Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion earlier this year, so in coming months we can expect to see a narrative unfold: Which will be deemed the album of the year? It's fun to speculate about in the same way it is to predict the song of the summer. Animal...

With all three members behind synthesizers, as Merriweather’s trippy cover art lined the stage’s background while a hanging, giant white orb projected thoughtful images, Portner (aka Avey Tare), Lennox (Panda Bear) and Weitz (Geologist) resembled dance club DJs at Tuesday’s sold-out show at the Riverside Theater.

This January, Baltimore’s Animal Collective released what will almost certainly be remembered as the landmark album of 2009, Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that joins Radiohead’s Kid A and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot among the most storied, revolutionary records of the decade. With its throbbing, flowering experimental pop, Merriweather has attracted nothing but accolades from every critical source of note, with nary a contrarian rising to challenge its phenomenon. It’s certainly a hard record to...

Thursday, May 14, Keyshia Cole w/ The-Dream, Keri Hilson and Bobby Valentino @ The Milwaukee Theatre, 8 p.m. This remarkable concert brings more major contemporary R&B singers to Milwaukee than the city usually hosts in an entire season. At the top of the bill is Keyshia Cole, who offsets her urbane...

For its eighth full-length, Animal Collective has pulled together its most like-minded set of material, making for the group's most consistently listenable, even poppiest album, to date. Each track builds through a tension-and-release pattern based on layers of modal drones and sound effects, with Brian Wilson harmonies dropping in and out as choruses whenever appropriate. Gone are the usual free-folk elements...