Animal Collective

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 dismiss. Since Animal Collective craft their trance-like carols with so much empty space for listeners to fill in, Merriweather emerged as something of a blank slate on which anything could be projected. Some saw it as the most wondrous acid trip; others the successor to the Beach Boys’ legacy, a few the seeds of prog-rock, but most everyone heard greatness.