Animal Collective

Thursday: As you walk the steady incline up to the festival site, chatter sparks from all directions from your fellow festival-goers as you reach the first gate to pass through. Swallowed by the atmosphere, you briefly snap out of your daze and remind yourself that you're surrounded by your friends equally happy to be reunited together.

Todd Terje is on in 20 minutes at the Bowers & Wilkins Sound System stage. Inhaling from my cigarette I look up and see a small stage to my left but more impressively, the Parc Del Forum at large. It's a beautiful structure which dominates the immediate skyline, towering over the site and its weekend habitants with the Mediterranean ocean stretching out behind it. You're at Primavera Sound - and trust me when I say that it's one of the best festivals you can experience on this side of the Atlantic.

We enter the Sound System Stage and I immediately notice that the speakers are ridiculously crisp. With Terje about to start, we queue up for some incredibly boozy mojitos and caipirinhas and head over to the tent which is already packed at 4pm. He is warmly welcomed onto the stage by a happy-go-lucky crowd as he punches into his much loved disco-revivalism, fiddles with classics and modern tracks alike as well as throwing in a couple of his much beloved hits. 

Continue reading: Primavera Sound Festival - Live Review

Early in 2009 we were in love again. Not thank god with the Klub Footed swagger of indie landfill Britain, but once more smitten were we with dandys from across the Atlantic: we grooved especially to Vampire Weekend's preppy, Ivy League afro-beat of course, but we really adored the lysergic, Vitamin D soaked weirdness of MGMT, the monumental Kids and Electric Feel sound tracking party after party after Jack and Coke chilled night in.

No-one was really sure at that point about Animal Collective, the frequently splenetic quartet/trio who'd emerged at the beginning of the decade, mostly because their records frequently seemed more like in-joke installations than anything from within the dimension of the normal. These reservations were then washed away by the avalanche of good that was Merriweather Post Pavilion, the moment at which the band's music went from edgy curio to mainstream via an intersect with the record buying public's newly discovered love of higher-brow kitsch.

Merriweather.., particularly on its elegiac flagship song My Girls, propelled AC's notoriously obtuse members onto a stage with their supposed compatriots, but it was a relationship with the industry's gestalt mechanics which began to fray almost immediately. For MGMT this meant total submergence in their psychedelic narrative: for Noah Lennox, Brian Weitz and David Portner, this meant releasing various solo projects ranging in accessibility. The album's follow up, 2012's Centipede Hz, was a return to confoundment, sounding like a beehive of ideas set off to a thousand random notes, whilst Josh Dibb, having declared himself on hiatus in 2007, has remained to one side ever since, right up to  Painting With's present.

Continue reading: Animal Collective - Painting With Album Review