Geologist – Hollinndagain

A transitional release, between their noisy beginnings and freak folk middle period

lol wtf are these prices. honestly $650 is just insanity

First let me start by stating that the pressing of this 2020 reissue is pretty good. I'd have to say that it isn't too often that a record really pushes my buttons. As soon as I put this on I thought my turntable was broken and got really concerned. Pretty smart of them. The rest of the album had me fluctuating between annoyed, amused, confused, and even some really hard laughter. I think the best way to describe this is "an experience."

The one that went for $100, wonder if it was signed by the band? Or did someone think they were getting a deal on the original limited handmade one??

Just a heads up, this is getting reissued sometime during March.

So the reissue isn't any worse than the original, right?

For me, this album is Animal Collective at one of their (numerous) creative peaks. The noisy, heavy drumming by Panda Bear really shines on this album. This is by far their loudest and noisiest record.

It's at an odd place in their discography, released after Danse Manatee and right before Campfire Songs. You could say it's them getting out of their noise period. The song-y parts of this album are really intense and hypnotic. You almost fall into them as they surround you. The synth noises that these guys made for this album astound me.

I can't really pick a favorite song out of Hollinndagain, it's such an experience that it's hard to pick out a little piece of it. It's most definitely an album that should be listened to in full. To me, this is the best of early AnCo (not to say that Spirit and Danse weren't great.)

this record is more representative of the noisier side of animal collective, which is a side that i'm much less interested in. we have now stumbled upon a manifestation of the paradox of j.

"how can you listen to all kinds of crazy, noisy abstract music and not like the animal collective? and how can you possibly like their pop records more than their experimental records, given that you mostly listen to noise? you make no sense, j."

but, i do make sense. you didn't allow me to discuss the reasons why i'm not, in general, impressed by the animal collective.

i watched an old pink floyd video once, i actually think it was the pompeii video, where somebody is discussing electronic experimentation in music and providing the same old arguments to roger waters that he's heard a thousand times. anyone can make noise out of electronics, or so claims the interviewer, so why is pink floyd special? waters responds in a calm and somewhat apathetic tone of voice that gear does not make the artist. waters conceded that it is perhaps true that anybody can make the gear make noise, but not everybody can make the gear make noise that is interesting to listen to. not everybody is going to come up with the same slabs of sound that pink floyd came up with. so, what makes pink floyd special is simply that the band consists of musicians that are somewhat knowledgeable about both the gear they're using and the music they're trying to create.

it's an obvious response, one that makes perfect sense and is difficult to counter. it splits electronic music into two categories - that which is composed by musicians and that which is composed by people that don't really know what they're doing.

what i hear in the animal collective is the opposite side of the coin, i hear a bunch of rich kids messing around with a bunch of gear that they don't really understand, twiddling knobs, breaking things, just plain out fucking around. i hear a lot of sound that was clearly constructed by running things through presets - presets on effects pedals, preset banks on synthesizers. there is an argument to be made, then, that the animal collective represent the worst possible aspect of the avant garde. this music is not experimental because music of a similar style has been being created for 50 years. it is not challenging in any respect. it is not complicated enough to be interesting. it is not abstract enough to be interesting. it does not command any wonder or awe, other than wondering what these kids' parents were thinking when they bought them all of this gear.

the most irritating part of the record is the vocals. the slab of sound would be much more listenable if it was instrumental.

now, on the other hand, when we speak of the animal collective's poppier output, we hear an act that has spent a little bit of time learning how to play all of these shiny toys that they have in front of them, but that is attacking the problem of writing music from a very different viewpoint - the viewpoint of being in a prominent noise act and developing a cult of devout followers. how many pop bands have that kind of background? so, we're able to hear somebody combine acts like radiohead with acts like coil. this genre splicing is a thousand times more creative, abstract and interesting than a bunch of stoned kids twiddling knobs, breaking drumkits and screaming as loud as they can.

have i resolved the paradox? the claim is that feels is a more abstract and groundbreaking sound than something like hollinndagain, i.e. the reason i like the pop records is because the pop records are actually the more experimental offerings!

even so far as their noisier side goes, this is particularly lame. it's not even a recorded record full of composed pieces. it's two different sets of improvised idiocy.

if you're unfamiliar with experimental music, you may find this revolutionary. i do recognize that this band has broadened the horizons of many. furthermore, it's certainly more interesting than 95% of the other shit that's out there. it is enjoyable on the pure listening level; it's on the intellectual level that this act breaks down. my scorn is primarily the result of the fact that i tend to get pissed when an act goes over an existing style of music, creates a second rate clone and then gets all of the credit for inventing it. go ahead and buy the record and enjoy it, just don't call them experimental or refer to their early work as either abstract art or revolutionary music. they were just a bunch of rich kids fucking around with a ton of gear, without much of any concept of how the gear works or much of any kind of vision attached to the end result...

if you want to look into the acts that defined this kind of music, begin with nurse with wound and then go from there.

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