100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #6 Animal Collective – My Girls

Released: 2009

What is dream pop, if it can’t be about dreams? Most often the phrase is applied to music which is being made by, or listened to, folks who’re engaged in some chemically enhanced alternate reality, hazed sonics as a cipher for abandonment, expanded consciousness, or just as an idea of joy as an abstract experience.

Animal Collective had, put bluntly, always felt like an indulgence until the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion, their eighth album and one recorded as a trio in the absence of Josh “Deakin” Dibb (They all have odd stage names, don’t ask). Following a pathway opened up on Panda Bear’s 2007 solo album Person Pitch, on it the remaining three kicked up the use of samplers and MPC’s, in the process finally matching the promise they’d intermittently showed throughout their often diverted careers.

My Girls wasn’t just dream pop in the grand sense, the noise of pastoral rave and a rolling proclamation with fantasy at it’s conceptual heart, but also in fact, as Panda Bear/Noah Lennox used the sweetscape to talk about his simple aspirations “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things/Like a social status/I just want four walls/and adobe slabs for my girls.” With this song finally here was everything – the boundary less frescos of our sleeping world scored by what the place we lay awake in might one day promise.