First-past-the-post.

Their music has always been manna for critics, and milk and honey for weird indie kids (the kind who actually like the wacked-out experimental sounds they're supposed to listen to). And to the average listener, it sounds like sugar-happy toddlers unleashed on a keyboard loaded with trippy samples, animal sounds, and wobbly vocal mods. 

Last year I winced and pulled my hood over my ears at their music sound "experimentation" onstage at Rogers picnic.

But this time around, everyone's getting merry about their new collection. Two weeks in and its already the best album of the year―and don't be surprised if it holds its ground for another eleven and a half months.

This time around the post, the crazed combines with the conventional to create a masterpiece accessible enough for the open-minded radio listener, clear and sunny enough for the well-weathered ear, and still innovative enough to make dryest critics drip with excitement.

As for the album, I grant you three guesses. (Clue: the hint's in the puns. You know me, you know my lust for the lowliest form of literary musing.)

1, 2,... 3.

Merriweather. Post. Pavillion.

I've always liked Animal Collective (their studio work at the least), but sometimes their sounds are too, er, animalistic for me to corral. I'd file them away in the "experimental" section of my iTunes and hope one day my music tastes matured enough to appreciate the layers and the levels. 

Now, I don't have to. Finally, the collective has reached the perfect balancing point, the place where experiment and audible melody work harmoniously together, where inventions come from actual intentions, and where their "music" (which I might have just named "noise" pre-M.P.P.) is truly good music. And that is why this album is, and probably still will be, to the critics and the common folk, the best album of 2008. Shit. 2009.*

*That is, unless any of the following bands reunite and/or release an album on or before December 31, 2009: TV on the Radio, Radiohead, Wilco, or the Beach Boys**.

**Seriously.