Features: Fringe · Adam Hills · After The End · Arj Barker · Charlie Pickering · Geraldine Quinn · Gorden Southern · Tarnished · There's Something About Fairy · Tom Gleeson WOMADelaide · Akoustic Odyssey · Seckou Keita · Amanda Palmer · Animal Collective · Belles Will Ring · Bob Log III · High Places · Armored Saint · Cry Murder · Pulp Fiction Comics · Silverstein · Vetiver Animal Collective Animal Collective have finally made an album that is making people sit up and take notice, wondering why on earth they've not heard of this bizarre and brilliant band before. Having had a long career rooted in experimentation, their new album 'Merriweather Post Pavilion' has garnered the sort of positive reaction that most groups dream of achieving, with every publication from mainstream media to obscure blogs declaring it - at such an early stage of the year - to be a likely contender as one of the albums of 2009 and, indeed, a likely candidate for a 'best of the 2000s' gong. Yet, according to Brian Weitz (a.k.a. Geologist), nothing has changed all that much for the group - in the first half of 2009 the band will continue to play venues that they've played before. Naturally enough, they're expected to sell out mightily quickly indeed. "Visibly it's hard to look out into a crowd and feel that things are different," he explains, "and I haven't really looked at album sales or anything like that, or chart positions in the US, so it's hard to know if anything's changed." Clearly the sheer weight of paper has been far more significant - the band have got coverage all across the board. "Friends of my parents are seeing my in newspapers or magazines that they read," Weitz says wryly. The reason for the mass adulation being heaped upon Merriweather Post Pavilion is simple - it is the most coherent, linear, and song-focussed release of the band's eight album long career. "I think it has more recognisable structure," he agrees, "and it's produced in a way that's easier to swallow." But, he insists, the early Animal Collective records were not about experimentation over song structure - while they certainly improvised, the fact that they got pegged as a band who like to experiment was often over-stated. "Everything on those early records is pretty based in song structure. I just think we don't hide the structure so much as we used to - we used to favour things in the production like noises or frequencies that didn't belong to the traditional song structure, whereas now we favour the more recognisable parts. We're better at blending the two together than we used to be." The band don't seem to draw their inspiration from any Animal Collective album for the sound of 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'. Instead, they look very much toward 'Person Pitch', the solo release from member Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), with samplers as the primary source of sound. "Dave, who's Avey Tare, is the primary songwriter when we do Animal Collective records. I think after [2004 album] 'Feels' we'd watched Noah create 'Person Pitch' for three years or however long it took him to make that batch of songs. He was always playing them for us before he released the songs. So even coming off 'Feels' we were super-inspired by his process of doing things with samplers and loops." When Animal Collective started writing 'Feels' follow-up 'Strawberry Jam' there were, Weitz explains, several numbers that Avey Tare had begun working on using different loops and samples - a good example being Reverend Green, which started off based around a piano loop. "Then he wrote a vocal melody, then we took the loop out and produced it more like a rock band. Cuckoo was also written that way. So it had already started to seep into the process by being deliberately inspired by the use of samplers." "We tried to create the majority of the samples ourselves," he continues. "It's not like Noah's record where he did it by sampling other people's music, so a lot of the samplers are us. For me personally it was to add more melodic or rhythmic [ideas] in more musical ways." Sampling one's own created music sounds incredibly work intensive, the band effectively making a song, then taking it apart, and putting it back together, but Weitz insists that wasn't quite the case. "We already thought ahead; it wasn't like we played a lot of stuff and then chose samples from it, and then reworked it," he says. "We had the idea that if we had a sample or a work that did 'this' in the song, then we'd go about creating it. That's another example of it not being really as experimental as it might come across. The ideas are really very deliberate. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting is not a word I would choose for this record - the whole thing was pretty easy and fun throughout." Andrew Weaver 'Merriweather Post Pavilion' is out now on Domino through EMI.