January 6, 2009
So you get Merriweather Post Pavilion the day it comes out and you’re listening to it and you’re thinking, Nice, this is like a streamlined Feels or a poppier Strawberry Jam. Then it ends and from your bed you use your stereo remote to press play and listen to the whole thing over again. Now it’s more like the best thing you’ve ever heard. Later that night, after you’ve eaten dinner and called a few people (to talk about Merriweather Post Pavillion, or not) you go back and explore individual songs. You listen to ‘My Girls’ several times in a row. Or ‘Also frightened.’ Or ‘Summertime Clothes.’ Or ‘Lion in a Coma.’ Or ‘Brother Sport.’

The rest of January
The next morning you drive around listening to Merriweather Post Pavilion with your friends in your car. You get to about ‘Daily Routine’ before you get to where you’re going and have to stop. On the drive home you finish the album.

You find the Kids on Holiday video review really funny and ‘wish you had thought to do something like that.’ You consider bringing your MacBook around with you and filming people while loudly making fun of them, like they do in all their videos (you watch them all). Also, you totally agree that the ‘My Girls’ video is lame because it blatantly shows the Roland keyboards/synthesizers.

You listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion pretty much nonstop for the next week (month) or so. Once you get past the almost too-obvious didgeridoo-sounding part at the beginning, you love ‘Lion in a Coma.’ You love ‘Sometimes the sun will shine, yes I’m just feelin’ fine/ Sometimes I’m not aware of where I am or what I care/ Sometimes I’m well-to-do but I don’t know what to do/ Sometimes I don’t agree with my thoughts on bein’ free’ and the slowed down ‘please don’t leave me’ part really ‘reminds you of something.’ You understand that ‘Taste’ is about taste and that is so cool. You can’t stop singing ‘are you also friiiiiightened.’ ‘Bluish’ is one of the most romantic songs you’ve ever heard. ‘My Girls’ makes you want kids, badly. You also love how quickly its ‘four walls and adobe slabs’ line became such a thing.

You do blind contour drawings of the band members on enormous pieces of butcher paper and leave them hanging in your living room for weeks.

February to April
You kind of forget about Merriweather Post Pavilion. Or at least you get swept up in all of this new lo-fi. You hate the name the Pains of Being Pure at Heart but it doesn’t sound bad. Your friend burns it for you. Later on, you’re looking at Pitchfork and notice the new Wavves album got an 8.1. You seriously contemplate whether or not you should buy it. Finally, you do. You decide it’s worth it. It’s really good and ‘way more listenable than you thought.’ By now you’re completely swept up in the beachy shit-gaze aesthetic. Vivian Girls! Blank Dogs mp3s! Woods’ new album! Japandroids! ‘Love is a Wave’!

Late in April you go to a Crystal Stilts/Wavves show. Wavves won’t stop acting cooler than everybody and somehow all of Crystal Stilts’ guitars break, prompting their disappointingly uncool guitarist to banter awkwardly about football, the weather. Still, it was a pretty good show, you think. Cool, at least. You still listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion but not as often and not as an album, either: you listen to certain songs but kind of forget about the whole thing.

You are looking forward to the new Grizzly Bear record.

You have a fever the week Veckatimest comes out and, after listening to it, you’re not that impressed. Mainly just because you feel like you should, you listen to it a couple more times––even once ‘outdoors’––but still feel bored by it. You’re glad you  have it though and can see yourself listening it to it more later maybe.

How can this possibly compete with Merriweather Post Pavilion, you think, chuckling. However, you really, really like the whole outdoorsy Animal Collective/Grizzly Bear conceptual/natural aesthetic. Soon, of course, the outdoors/relaxed/contemplative aesthetic mixes with the lo-fi scene to create a brand new genre. The summer begins.

A chillwave summer
You buy into chillwave almost immediately. You read Gorilla vs. Bear often and really appreciate ‘what they’re doing’ but don’t really care. Wavves and, like, the Mayfair Set is enough for you, you think. Soon, though, you can’t resist: you download Washed Up’s ‘Feel It All Around,’ the Big Pink’s ‘Velvet,’ Neon Indian’s scene-definingly-titled ‘Terminally Chill’ and ‘Deadbeat Summer,’ and countless Memory Tapes/Memory Cassette tracks. Also, someone at work gives you a CD-R with a bunch of Best Coast songs on it, ‘Sun Was High (So Was I)’ being one of them. Your friend burns you nº 2 by jj, too: summery. You’re totally sold now. Your chillwave playlist grows daily and you love how all of the artwork is so appealing and beachy; it’s such ‘a look.’ (Side note: You really like the xx mp3s you’ve heard but hesitate labeling them chillwave. You know they’re more advanced, or something.) However, you have not forgotten about Merriweather Post Pavilion. On the contrary. As soon as summer comes you are instantly brought back to it’s rich, warm, almost sweaty world. ‘Summertime Clothes’ goes side by side with all of your chillwave songs on mixes. You practically scream at how good it sounds when Avey Tare sings ‘my bed is a pool and the walls are on fire.’ ‘When the sun goes down we’ll go out again’ gets stuck in your head for weeks.

You think you own everything Animal Collective’s ever done until your friend sends you a link to the Amazon page of Campfire Songs. You’re considering spending $60+ on it when the same friend texts you later that day saying his other friend just got Campfire Songs on a torrent and he can burn it for you. Whew, you think. At the same time, in the back of your head, all you can think about is owning the actual CD. The next day you read something about Animal Crackbox. Immediately you check Ebay, thinking the all-vinyl collection of live material would be ‘good to have.’ They’re already all going for like $400. You bookmark the page. You buy a few múm albums only because you read that Avey Tare’s wife Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir used to be a member. In a record store in New York you impulsively buy the couple’s awful experimental album Pullhair Rubeye.

The new Wavves song sounds like Animal Collective. The new Atlas Sound song basically is Animal Collective. Filter magazine’s cover story on Animal Collective is inexplicably called ‘An Interior Design.’ You don’t read it, of course.

You’re even more addicted now. You seriously consider buying crates of Merriweather Post Pavilion CDs and handing them out to complete strangers, saying, You have never heard anything better than this. You throw around terms like perfect album and find yourself comparing everything––food, pants––to Merriweather Post Pavilion. Whenever you’re in a record store, you pick up the Animal Collective albums on vinyl––Strawberry Jam looks amazing––and carry them around with you just so you can hold them and feel them.

You really, really want sheets of the trippy optical illusion image from Merriweather Post Pavilion’s cover to decorate…every surface of your house with. You think making boxers out of the fabric printed with the Merriweather Post Pavilion cover pattern would be a great idea.

Late one night, you and your friend spend hours watching live footage of Animal Collective on YouTube. ‘Summertime Clothes’ live seems amazing. It’s all slowed down and even crunchier; ‘My Girls’ sounds completely different.

All of a sudden, you can’t listen to anything else again. It’s all Animal Collective all the time. Also, you revisit your older Animal Collective albums. Could Sung Tongs be any better, you scoff. And Danse Manatee: my god! Feels is just too good, you think during the retracted noises that end of ‘Do You See the Words’ on your third straight listen. Soon, you find yourself spending days listening to nothing but Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. And you even convince yourself that the beginning part of ‘April and the Phantom’ sounds good. (’It’s awesome in the car,’ you tell people.) And that torrent of Campfire Songs sounds even more amazing now. (You still want the CD though; the tiny disruptions that iTunes puts between songs are driving you crazy. You decide you need uninterrupted rainy strumming.) All of a sudden, in a panic, you realize that somehow you don’t own Here Comes the Indian.

Fall and winter are kind
You see that Pitchfork gives ‘What Would I Want? Sky’ a 10 and the entire Fall Be Kind EP an 8.9. Like, what else would they do, you think. By now you’re a little sick of Animal Collective.

You make a playlist about home and decide to include ‘My Girls’ on it. This, of course, inspires you to revisit the entire album. Amazingly, it sounds brand new again. It’s as if you’ve never listened to ‘Guys Eyes’ or ‘Daily Routine’ before. ‘Shit, fuck,’ you mutter as you quickly google the lyrics. All you really remembered about ‘Daily Routine’ was the slow-really-fast-really-really-fast bit at the beginning. Listening now, and reading the lyrics, it’s so much more. It’s amazing, and it’s sort of ‘My Girls Pt. 2’: ‘Make sure my kid’s got a jacket/ And coat and shoes and I/ Strap a stroller to my back/ Bouncing along every crack.’ Beautiful. How did you never notice this before. You want, like, a wife and kids really, really badly now. It’s so good, jesus, you think. ‘What can I do as traffic pass?/ Guard my girl from muffler’s black gas.’ ‘Guys Eyes,’ too, sounds new and fuller, you think. You realize that you never thought about the words in these two songs. You don’t know quite why. Maybe the melodies were so distracting or the words were hard to understand.

Now though, almost a year after Merriweather Post Pavilion came out, it almost sounds like you’re playing it for the first time. ‘Guys Eyes’: ‘If I could just hold all the thoughts in my head and just keep them for you/ If I could just purge all the urges that I have and keep them for you.’ Perfect, you think, unable to believe that you never fully got these songs before.

You listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion several more times, refocusing on parts and songs you may have neglected before.

Obviously 2009 was the year of Merriweather Post Pavilion, you think as you read over Pitchfork’s Merriweather Post Pavilion review. But you also notice that the review, which was posted on January 5, 2009, is boring and the songs themselves are barely mentioned. The album’s brilliance could never, ever fully sink in within such a short pediod. Even with dozens and dozens of early-January listens, it took a full year for it to really unfold and show you just how completely incredible it is. And, you think, there’s much more to see.

You still really want some kids.