(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

At the start I thought this would be really cheesy, but it ended up almost making me cry. I did say “almost.” Merry Christmas, everyone.

P.S. I realize that cheesiness and being brought close to tears are not necessarily mutually exclusive states, so the video clip can and in fact does meet both criteria for a special Christmastime message.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009)

It should be good to share our favorite things
I’ll keep an open mind if you let me in
Don’t let your temper rise, don’t get a bitter face
Try not to judge me on my kind of taste
And don’t go changing clothes when they don’t like yours

This invitation and counsel comes from the closing verse of the song “Taste,” a squelching Beach Boys-meets-Main Street Electrical Light Parade stomp from Animal Collective’s latest opus, Merriweather Post Pavilion. If ever there was one album worth leaving your musical comfort zone for, an album worth spending some time getting acquainted with, allowing it to grow and reveal its many delights and rewards to you (even, and maybe especially, if you didn’t like it at first), this is the one.

Throughout their career as a band, Animal Collective has tapped into the joyful, scary sounds of childhood sonic exploration. By this I refer to the fun, meandering, genius songs that some four-year-olds make up on the spot, or the wild sounds you might hear an untrained five year old who has free reign at a piano pound out. In other words, these are the musical activities children feel free to do before they learn to do them the proper way, before they become self-conscious and embarrassed about such behavior, or before the keyboard cover is slammed down and they are dragged out of grandma’s living room to timeout. The members of Animal Collective either never moved past this stage or they found some magical way to revert to it. They are “playing” music, and as play it is imaginative, primal, experimental, fun, obnoxious, and, perhaps above all, mysterious.

I emphasize the mystery of their music because It is often nearly impossible to figure out what instruments, sounds, or playing methods you are hearing at any particular moment in an Animal Collective song.  In past efforts their lyrics were sometimes difficult to correctly decipher and included words placed together as much or more for their sound as for their meaning.  Again, this mystery and abstraction points back to that childlike propensity to “play,” their ignorance of many of the conventions of musicianship or their belligerent refusal to adhere to them. Over the course of their career they have developed their own idiosyncratic methods of creating music using their instruments, their computers and their voices, and this has made for several albums worthy of the listening ear of an open-minded music fan. However, with the songs on Merriweather they have clearly become masters of their self-made musical methods; this is their most accomplished and accessible album to date, in both songwriting and arrangement. Each song is fully formed, inhabiting its own lush and unique world.

Their instrumental mystery/mastery is in full play from the outset of the album with the song “In the Flowers.” Various abstract noises soon resolve themselves into a waltz rhythm featuring a triplet figure played on an instrument that, with each morphing note, sounds like it could be something different: Is it a harp? a harpsichord? a guitar? a treated piano? a synthesizer? After the second verse the song explodes into a beautiful cacophony of abstract sounds that give the effect of a full-on symphony orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds, the whole package. I say “give the effect” because this “orchestration” is likewise of indeterminate instrumental origins. This wonderful noise blasts out over a thick electro-timpani beat and orchestral percussion. It simultaneously evokes a Tchaikovsky ballet movement and contemporary electronic dance music. Such musical references to dance make the lyrics and music entirely symbiotic, as the singer imagines dancing with the one he loves, from whom he is currently far removed.

Unabashed playfulness and lyrical mastery also abound in “Summertime Clothes,” which is at once a hugely weird summer jam, a perfectly written pop song, and a sort of “Good Vibrations” or “Singin’ in the Rain” for 2009. Sizzling, gurgling soda pop sounds and ambient street noise accompany euphoric singing that describes a hot summer nighttime walk through city streets:

It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel
Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal
I point in the windows, you point out the parks
Rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks
We’ll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass
Weave through the cardboard, smell that trash
Walking around in our summertime clothes,
Nowhere to go while our bodies glow
And we’ll greet the dawn in its morning blues
With purple yawn, you’ll be sleeping soon
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you

To me, one of the most winning aspects of <em>Merriweather</em> is the fact that so much sonic playfulness and weirdness is coupled with lyrics firmly grounded in domestic life. These are not songs about random sex, drugs, violence, and rock n’ roll excess, nor are they political rants, trite love songs, or absurd fantasies, but rather songs about wanting to provide a decent home for your family (“My Girls”), songs about missing your spouse when traveling (“In the Flowers,” “Guys Eyes,”), songs about waking up early and getting your child ready for the day (‘Daily Routine”), and songs giving advice to a little brother (“Brother Sport”).  In these songs the mundane becomes magical and the banal goes wild.

A fine example is “Daily Routine,” which, with its cut-up organ flourishes, vocal harmonies, and fat hip-hop beats sounds like a Timbaland remix of Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” However, in contrast to the mysticism of Yes songs and the vulgarity of much of hip-hop, “Daily Routine” lyrically depicts the pedestrian events the title implies, “Make sure my kid’s got a jacket / And coat and shoes and hat. / Strap a stroller to my back / Bouncing along every crack.” The true genius comes in the second part of the song, all slow, echoing, reverb-drenched drone over which the lines “Just a sec more…in my bed / Hope my machine’s working right” are sung repeatedly, musically re-creating the feeling of wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

Despite the many details and colors of the music, it is the simple exuberance of many of these songs that keeps me listening to them over and over again. I love the counter-intuitive brilliance of closing the album with a song as enthusiastic, infectious, and stadium-ready as “Brother Sport.” I smile and marvel at the audacity of filling the hand-clapping pop anthem chorus of “My Girls” with the so not rock-n-roll lines, “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things / (like a social stance) / I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls / (Woooooooh!)” Taken together, the songs of this album set forth a refreshing view of life in which the hottest party is at home with the family, and nothing is more exciting than spending time with the ones you love. In my opinion it’s a mature perspective to express with such wild and childish sounds. Due to this album’s sonic inventiveness, its musical hyperactivity, its total lack of cynicism and negativity, and it’s all-around positive energy and joyousness, I can’t really imagine an album coming out any time this year that I will like more than this one. Ultimately this is why I feel this is the one album among so many that is worth the time of the not-usually-patient listener: the more you listen to it, the more it may make you happy.

We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter.  We met to shovel snow under the full moon.  We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.

Imagine a room in which many of the people you have ever known at any point in your entire life are all gathered together: your best friend in 4th grade, most of your cousins, a casual acquaintance from church, your in-laws, people you barely knew in high school and rarely talked to, a couple of your aunts, your bishop, some co-workers, that girl you had a crush on in junior high, old roommates, your neighbor up the street, some close friends, some casual friends, and some people who were friends with your friends but never really friends with you.  Every now and then a few more people you know come trickling into the room.  Still, a few of the people you most expected or wanted to see there are notably absent.

In this room, some people are casually conversing with each other, as though it were a party.  But not everyone is in agreement on this social scenario.  A lot of people stand around the edges of the room, just people watching.  A girl you went to college with is standing at a lectern giving a political speech, but no one really seems to be listening to her.  There are several games of tag going on, and someone is also shooting spit wads around the room.  In the far corner, your old high school buddy is projecting home movies onto the wall and a few people are watching them.  Still others in the room are taking turns shouting out questions to the people around them, trying to get them to raise their hands to show agreement or disagreement.  Your little cousin is running around giving people either noogies or wet willies.  One guy is listing off every single song he has listened to, every single movie he has watched, every single book he has read, and every single place he has visited with an autistic precision.  A couple sits on a couch, totally making out with each other in front of everyone.  Your uncle is working the crowd for takers in a multi-level marketing scheme selling liquid hand soap.  Some of the people in the room turn out to simply be cardboard cut-outs.

You yourself are just another one of the people in the crowd; what are you doing in this situation?  If such a room filled with such a conglomeration of people existed, how often would you choose to visit it?  What would you do when you were there, and why?  Would you slam the door and run away screaming?  Would you spend all your spare time there?  Would you try to bring others along and show this place to them?

What if I were to suggest that you may already be visiting such a room as I have described as often as every single day of your life?  You may even be carrying a portal to this room around in your pocket.  If the idea of having the ability to converse and interact with so many people in such a room fills you simultaneously with fascination, consternation, and dread, then you have a sense of how I feel whenever I receive word that someone has contacted me from that magical room, and why I so often avoid going into that room, even though sometimes I kind of want to and even though sometimes I feel like I probably should.

Also In This Issue: Why My Twitter Updates Show Up Here As Entries On My Blog

A couple of months ago I jumped into twitter, and I liked it so much that I soon began looking for a way to incorporate it into this blog, which at the time was still unknown and in the process of being built.  Unlike, um, now?  I’ve had a couple of friends and would-be readers of this blog tell me they didn’t know what the deal was with twitter and didn’t understand why I have twitter updates on my blog.  So here are my best answers.

For those who don’t know, twitter is a little web 2.0 service that lets users publish brief comments, often referred to as microblogs.  There are numerous other microblogging formats, but twitter is a nice clean and simple one that works well, and as far as I know it was also one of the first.  Ostensibly, every twitter update is supposed to answer the question “What am I doing?,” but most people, including me, do not slavishly answer that question with every update.  An update has a maximum limit of 140 characters, which usually works out to a couple of sentences if you push it. This forces a concise brevity.  It helps comedic timing.  It forces others to read between the lines.  It usually just enough to get you intrigued.

You can and would want, of course, to follow the twitter updates of others, and when you log in to your twitter page, your updates and their updates are all racked up there together, with the most recent updates on top.  So you can visit twitter once every day or two, or every week or two, and quickly see some of the things that your friends and family members have been doing and thinking in the past little while.  I like it because I feel like the friends I follow are around and I kind of know what’s going on with them, even if I don’t see them very often or talk to them on the phone every day.  All the time I am thinking of other friends and family members that I wish were on twitter because I want to know what’s going on with them and I know they would have funny and interesting little comments to make.  A random blog entry that I happened upon one time compared twitter updates (as well as chat, to which I’ve never really been converted) to the kind of quick, useful and/or fun interactions that happen in an office of cubicles (like where I work), in which people pop their heads up or around for a minute to say hi or ask a question or just spaz out for a minute, and then after a moment everyone gets back to work.  That’s twitter.  It’s brief and informal, yet somehow intimate.  It doesn’t take more than thirty seconds to write an update, and it doesn’t take more than a minute or two to catch up on all your friends’ updates.  Much easier than reading or writing massive blog entries, like this one.

I do admit that twitter is not entirely unlike Facebook’s status updates, but it is a more pure and direct service for making concise or pithy statements about your thoughts and doings in the world, and it is much easier to find out what is really truly up with your friends, rather than how many Ghostbusters II movie quizzes they took yesterday or who gave them a virtual Dwight Shrute bobblehead.  No one on twitter will invite you twenty times to become a vampire ninja and join them in the fight against the pirate werewolves.

So, I think I’ve shown why I feel that twitter is awesome; but why is twitter on my blog?  Well, I started to  address that in a prior entry, but basically it is here because I like my twitter updates and thought they would make nice little breaks between the longer, more essay-like blog entries here at the Froz-T-Freez.  I also thought I would use them as springboards for longer entries, but so far that has only happened once or twice.  I thought it would make for a more steady stream of content, as I’m really irregular with keeping up on things here.  I thought it would be fun to practice some verbal brevity, as twitter has reminded me that you don’t always need to write paragraphs to express something well.

And with that, I’m going to sleep now.  Goodnight.

Walked down the river trail to Bridal Veil Falls with the Beutlers this morning.  Fall was at the height of its powers.  Thanks for coming; it was fun.  Here are some pictures.  I didn’t take many, though.  I’m really sorry your camera was lost to the forests of Timpanogos.