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Animal Collective - My Girls

Single Reviews

With ‘My Girls’, Animal Collective leave you somehow feeling as though they’ve reinvented sliced bread.

For some reason, this song feels like being in an aviary, its depth of sound – the handclaps, the interweaving vocals of Avey Tare and Panda Bear, the pitter patter of tinny synths and a massive, throbbing heart. It would be enough to drive you to staring into a black hole, trying to draw out the feeling to own it.

Racing back to the start, however, as this baby grows from embryonic simplicity of the slightly ostinato synths that pre-empt the beat and add the third dimension to Animal Collective’s new offspring, into the quiet chaos over five and a half minutes. For a lyric of so much basic need: “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things / I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls”, it seems this trio have mastered anything but a simple single.

The canonical repetition between Avey and Panda is disorientating and similarly comforting, growing into an almost tribal cavalcade of beats and lateral movement. When frequently dirgy offerings are brought up, it’s easy to forget how lofty music can make you feel. With ‘My Girls’, Animal Collective leave you somehow feeling as though they’ve reinvented sliced bread, if not the wheel. Rating: 9/10