Six Degrees of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion

Almost any track on the album can be broken down into a parade of blends and juxtapositions: the straightforward samba of "Bluish" is doused in ring modulator noise; the nostalgic pangs of "In the Flowers" - a '60s-style folk song at heart - explodes into synthesizer fireworks and a rhythmic throb part German schaffel, part dub. "My Girls," the album's most inescapable track, is a rudimentary indie-pop singalong that borrows its synth loop from Chicago house innovator Frankie Knuckles, and the album-closing "Brother Sport" is, cultural cache aside, basically ready for a conga line, like an old Harry Belafonte record blasting from across a lake. For every oyster, there's grit; for every fat, there's citrus.

Not that Merriweather is without Animal Collective's stain. The way the band assimilates their influences is so sharp-witted and seamless that they're impossible to mistake for anyone else, which is why their imitators are so plainly boring - they ape the band's sound, not their attitude. Ultimately, it's not influence that makes a record like Merriweather, it's the band's approach - their irreducible Animal Collectiveness. But just because we're not going to end up with the same constellation doesn't mean we can't connect a few dots.

A lot like Merriweather Post Pavilion, actually, half of which sounds like it's splashing in a bucket of water, half of it like it's playing inside a cave. On earlier albums, Geologist - the electronics manipulator most easily recognized as "the one with the miner's headlight" - sounded off to the side, a guy tossing noisy non-sequiturs into the mix. On Merriweather, he's everywhere and essential - in a lot of ways, the foundation for the songs themselves, the vehicle they arrive in. It's no accident that on Bosavi, the crickets get a liner-note credit.

Merriweather didn't ever get the next-Beatles comparisons that washed over The Stone Roses, but that's no surprise - next to tidy Byrds updates like "Made of Stone," even "My Girls" glows and pulses like contraband. But on tracks like "Elephant Stone" and "I Am the Resurrection" - as incredibly dated as some of those funked-up beats are - The Stone Roses shows a band, like Animal Collective, leaning toward a pop-oriented sound after spending years in more subcultural realms.

And like Animal Collective, the Weavers were a distinctly American group that reached outside America for several of their songs: There's a version of "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena," originally written in Hebrew by a Polish guy living in Israel; there's the ubiquitous, lovely "Guantanamera." And, of course, "Wimoweh," known in the States as the blueprint for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" but originally recorded by a South African vocal group called the Evening Birds as "Mbube" - a song whose woodsy lilt and wail could easily be mistaken for Animal Collective's.

Other times, both records gush with ephemera - the shuddering noises on Merriweather's "Lion in a Coma"; the stray whispers and gasps on Luomo's "Market" or "Tessio." And when Panda Bear and Avey Tare sing "My Girls" - a song built on something more like a slogan than actual lyrics - they're like positive-force buddies patting the backs of the heartbroken vocalists that haunt Vocal City.

There are a lot of underlying similarities between Merriweather and much of Perry's output at the time - hazy, aquatic sounds underpinned by driving rhythms; melodic sweetness balancing out what can sometimes be sour subject matter; a marriage of ambience and song. But the most important connection - and what makes the link between Merriweather and Heart of the Congos unique - is the singing. Avey Tare's mischievous and sometimes grotesque voice balances out Panda Bear's angelic one just as that Roy Johnson's tenor anchors Cedric Myton's falsetto. Both records are steeped studio tricks and all the better for it, but their heart - and character - lies in delirious, delirious voices.