Animal Collective - My Girls

  by Jamie Rowland

published: 25 / 4 / 2009

Label: Domino Records
Format: CDS

intro

Enthralling, long overdue breakthrough single for New York-based electro pioneers, Animal Collective

You know that moment, when you’re sat in a bar that you don’t really like, but all of you’re friends go there so you’ve tagged along, and all of a sudden there’s a familiar sound creeping above the hubbub. It’s coming from the speakers; between the usual over-hyped dross and the “so hot right now” excreta of scantily-clad former art-students, you recognise a song playing which you are inexplicably both relieved and dismayed to hear. This is the latest single from a band that you have been following for years. No one knows about this band except for you and some guys you’ve never met – they probably live in New York, or something. Cool people. People like you imagine yourself to be. This is music for you; you and all the other guys who always knew that, actually, they really do have great taste, thank you very much, despite what everyone else might think. But all of a sudden here you are – in a bar you don’t like, surrounded by people that you’re pretty sure bought the Klaxons’ first album. And now that very special band that you love so much are playing out on the stereo. And everybody can hear them. And everybody likes them. And you really, really don’t want to be that music snob; that obnoxious, elitist loser who hates it when the bands he likes get successful, but still somewhere, at the back of your mind, a tiny voice desperately whines: “but this is my band...” So yes; Animal Collective has finally broken through into the wider consciousness. Having hung around for years on the precipice of the mainstream, they are now being featured on MTV and getting radio play from Zane Lowe. But do you know what? I don’t care. I really don’t. Despite being an unforgivably, unashamedly, fully-fledged forgetter-of-the-more-than-five-fans sort of a guy, I am absolutely at peace with ‘My Girls’ becoming a relatively big hit. Because it’s a great song – no, a fantastic song, and in the current trend of eighties revivalism, it shows everyone else what they should be doing. If you haven’t already gone out and bought this single, then you’re a fool to yourself, and I suggest you rectify the situation immediately. And if you don’t buy the album while you’re at it, well, more fool you, sir. More fool you. Animal Collective are primed to take over the music world (well, probably not, but they certainly should be), so get yourself a front-row seat and look forward to telling everyone “I was there; I was with them when they made it big”. As for me, I’m off to tell my friends how incredibly tedious the music they like is, and that the new group I’ve discovered are so fresh and, like, totally esoteric – all the while fully aware that I’ll dump them like a sodden sack of spuds the second anyone else claims to have heard of them.

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