We were really pulling for Panda Bear and crew. When I wrote last week that Animal Collective might make it onto the Billboard 200 charts this week based on the first-week sales of the vinyl edition of their Merriweather Post Pavilion album (raved about this week by our own James Montgomery), the underdog quality of that potential feat was kind of exciting ... and subversive.
But, alas, despite selling out all 4,500 copies of the first run of Pavilion almost instantly across North America, with so many of those sales happening in indie shops that don't report to Nielsen SoundScan, the scrappy sonic experimentalists just didn't make the cut.
According to next week's Billboard albums chart, Pavilion officially moved 1,500 copies, which put them just outside the big game, even in this moribund time of year when the majority of the albums in the top 200 saw double-digit sales dips. Read more...
The album the Chicago Tribune and Stereogum.com have already dubbed one of the best of the week-old year, Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, could make some serious news next week when the Nielsen SoundScan numbers come out.
Why? The album, which won't get released on CD until January 20, dropped on January 6 in a deluxe double-LP 180-gram gatefold vinyl format accompanied by a full album download. And thanks to a series of listening parties across the country, it just might break into the albums chart next week, thanks to vinyl sales only. Yeah, that's right, vinyl sales only (and, oh man, do Web sites loooooove to write about this wacky anachronism).
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The official Animal Collective Web site was recently updated with a mysterious, mind-melting, wallpaper-like pop-up jpeg, which we've just received confirmation is the cover for their highly anticipated album Merriweather Post Pavilion, due out January 20, 2009.
Stare at it long enough and you'll see a unicorn.
Not really.
But, seriously, does this artwork remind anyone else of those 3D Magic Eye posters that The Nature Company used to sell? In honor of my 14-year-old mallrat self ("Mom, I'll meet you in the LaserDisc section of Saturday Matinee!"), I just spent the last 15 minutes starting at this album cover, and here are 10 images that have emerged while my bleary eyes studied the pattern: Read more...
Getting to cover summer music festivals can sometimes be a mixed blessing. Unless you have an especially large crew (as we did two weeks ago at Lollapalooza), you end up spending a lot of time shooting interviews and writing or shooting standup segments, and not a lot of time actually seeing live music. Such was the case this past weekend New York's All Points West festival. (check out some of the bands we talked with right here). I did, however, manage to catch sets by two of my favorite bands, neither of which is playing many U.S. dates this summer.
Kings of Leon are the sort of dependable rock band that almost effortlessly delivers a good show — and while a colleague of mine thought they could have used a little more effort in Saturday's set, I thought they delivered solid renditions of fuzzed-out, whiskey-soaked songs that just do not get old: "Taper Jean Girl," "The Bucket" and "On Call" and definitely got the late-afternoon crowd going. Every time I see the Kings live I'm reminded of just how many great hooks and melodies these guys they've crammed into three albums — which makes it all the more amazing they're bigger in this country (they're massive in England). On Saturday, we were also treated to "Sex on Fire" — the first single (and one of the more hard-charging songs) from Only By the Night, the band's fourth LP, set for release September 23.
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