Animal Collective, "Feels"

The Warlocks did it, and now it's Animal Collective's turn to make the Great Album That I Didn't Think They Had In Them. In this case, I thought AC were too obsessed with being weird, too enamoured with starting at the crawling walls they saw in their acid flashbacks to keep their focus over the course of an entire album. I wanted them to make an album of two-minute psych-pop songs, with ten minute drone pieces interspersed around them. The mesmerizing "Banshee Beat" comes close to the latter. It's eight minutes long but could easily stretch on for twice that length.

They haven't gotten less weird on "Feels", but it's a mellower, more restrained album and perhaps that's why I like it so much more than "Sung Tongs": I'll take a good chillout album any day over an album of yelping and screaming.