Artist: Animal Collective
Title: Sung Tongs
Format: Double LP Gatefold Sleeve
Label: Fat Cat <<Splinter Series>>
Catalogue Number: FAT-SP08LP
Year of Release: 2004
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A1 Leaf House
A2 Who Could Win a Rabbit
A3 The Softest Voice
B1 Winters Love
B2 Kids on Holiday
B3 Sweet Road
C1 Visiting Friends
D1 College
D2 We Tigers
D3 Mouth Wooed Her
D4 Good Lovin Outside
D5 Whaddit I Done
I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this record is one of the greatest albums of all time. Universal acclaim is the Metacritic verdict. The Pitchfork review is particularly good, too.
I had the misfortune to catch currently-in-vogue The Guillemots on the radio the other day, and again today so it must be a new single on the 6 Music playlist or something, anyway, such was the song's lack of any interesting components - or at least, anything interesting that they hadn't nicked from their parent's record collection, that I began to fear for the future of the musical output of the country.
Here is my solution.
The Treasury should scrap the Child Trust Fund, and instead, new parents should get the equivalent value of great albums to play to their offspring. They should be made to play them all, on rotation, each at least once a month until said child leaves home.
I have already anticipated a major objection - that future UK music would all sound broadly similar. To which I say 1) If they were all, broadly, brilliant, what's the problem? and 2) Seeing as how governments seem quite keen on postcode lotteries these days, then what albums you get depends on where your parents live. I, for example, would have grown up listening to Elvis Presley and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, amongst other great things beginning with P. Anyone growing up in Edinburgh would get Brian Eno and The Earlies, perhaps.
If this doesn't take off (and I'll be writing to my MP, don't you worry) then I'll go to Plan B, which is based on the {surely} apocryphal story that a GP in France could prescribe you a diet of steak and red wine if you're depressed. I think you can see where I'm going with this one.
"Sung Tongs are tongs about returning to an old house, doing nothing with friends, or making sounds with bones."
What's not to like about a statement like that? Also, in this interview, "We like liquidy sounds". Lovely. The liquidy sounds don't really appear until the second half of the album, the 12 minute plus Visiting Friends, on which our two protagonists strum their acoustics lazily, and various effected lyrics and noises ebb and flow and wax and wain around them. It's like wearing your favourite jumper on a cold day.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, because there's also the bonkers, joyous pop of the opening two tracks to mention first. Leaf House has one of those synth noises at the start that sounds like an incoming missile, but I think it might be the only appearance of a synthesizer on the whole rest of the album. The song starts off with cut-up 'aaah' vocals over slow drums and acoustic strumming, but once the lyrics come in the structure of the song almost fragments, and harmonies fly all over the place.
It hangs together, only just, but is startlingly odd, and functions to prepare you for the onslaught of Who Could Win a Rabbit - which is 2:18 of perfection. Lyrics, where discernible, seem to concern a game at a fair (a "Bread-and-butter hustle"), but spurt out so fast and rapturously it's hard to tell, but what chorus there is goes "Rabbit or a habit! Habit or a rabbit!" and it manages to capture excitement, fear, bewilderment and the thrill of being a kid let loose to have unsupervised fun. [There's an occasional whispered 'yeah' which kind of sits about unnoticed for a bit, but when you've spotted it, you can't wait for it to come back, and find yourselves pointing your fingers at the speakers in a gun shape, and pulling the trigger when it comes in perfectly on the beat, smiling. But that might just be me.]
And they fit all that in, with room for 15 seconds of silly noises at the end. Brilliant.
The Softest Voice, and Winters Love calm things down a bit, Kids on Holiday picks it up again, as does the short and very sweet Sweet Road, which has a 30s jazz picked acoustic guitar line, and several vocal lines at once, with a sample of a child's voice going "Hurry up!". I don't think I've described it very well, but it's guaranteed to raise a smile.
The aforementioned Visiting Friends is followed by the 53 second College. This is maybe where some of the Brian Wilson comparisons have come from. Because it's basically 50 seconds of Beach Boys-style harmonising, then the message "You don't have to go to... College". And you know what kids? They're right!
We Tigers is also superb. There is one of the heaviest, most insistent rhythm tracks on the album, which to be honest isn't saying much, but it's there, and it's tribal. There are exclamations (Whoop!) peppered through it, more lyrics (Whoop!) delivered at indecipherable speed, but mostly concerning being a tiger, or just saying the word tiger a lot (Whoop! Whoop!). More quick strumming of acoustics and crazy harmonies abound.
The last three are post-coital by comparison, and sound like they were written lying in bed in the sunshine, which with titles like Good Lovin Outside, they probably were. It's a great way to round off a genius album.
Buy it now, and play it to everyone you know, and their children, and their children's children, and anyone who's in a band, or thinking of forming a band, or were ever in a band (just to make them jealous).
