Sung Tongs

Sung Tongs is 12 tracks and 52 minutes of the most bizarre and absolutely mind-bendingly infectious pop music that you'll hear this year.

Imagine a pagan Danielson Famile on magic mushrooms, or a folk-rock cLOUDDEAD. [Aug 2004, p.122]

You can imagine a modern-day Syd Barrett coming up with similar ideas after being locked in a closet with a laptop.

A great album from a fantastic band.

Stunning and dizzying, Sung Tongs’ strangeness will spin around your head for months to come.

While some may scoff at the gentler side of the Animal Collective (especially when contrasted with the fully electric assault of last year's studio release), Sung Tongs easily stands alone as a crowning achievement in their eclectic discography, one that finds the group fully in control of their musical prowess and all the better for it.

As simple as the instrumentation is on the album... they use it to maximum effect. [#11, p.98]

But despite its flaws, or perhaps because of them, this remains organic folk-pop at its bewildering best.

This is what you get when you give an overactive imagination the space to expand; it’s indescribably perfect.

Consistently fantastic. [#64, p.80]

Melds way-out weird with a pop welcome that sounds like no one else around right now. [May 2004, p.105]

By the time the longplayer finishes playing, you realize, whilst the acoustic guitars and harmonized vocals and that awesome table-tennis-ball-bouncing-beat may've made you think this was some easy-to-love pop platter, it actually hasn't stumbled all the way towards getting-it-together.

Despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Tongs is a romantic album; romantic in its celebration of innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge, and the sweet, trusted idea that everything will be fine-- as if it hadn't always been.

Sung Tongs is an inch more sublime than anything they've done previously, with more phenomenal use of their manic choir of Motown vocals, less scattered, clique-ish dissonance, and more sideshow bubblegum-pop freaking out on god-knows-what powerful substance.

One of the more creative and accomplished records you'll hear this year. [19 Aug 2004, p.118]

Before, it sounded like Animal Collective sought only to please themselves. Sung Tongs sounds like a concession to the rest of us, and that's not a very exciting prospect from such a unique and potentially great band.

Sung Tongs resembles the freakiest of '60s psyche, the outward fringes of Elephant Six-dom, the craziest excesses of Tom Ze -- yet it is a warm, deeply human work that winds its way into your heart.

On Sung Tongs, the group has deftly combined all the traces that ran through their earlier work into a vibrant and beautiful collage that flows as smoothly as Here Comes the Indian, with all the mood of Campfire Songs, and even more pop hooks than Spirit.

Snatches of certain songs owe a debt to weird-period Brian Wilson, but Sung Tongs sounds too hermetic and comfortable in its singularity to cast such a literal gaze.

The best stuff views the world through the sunkissed psychedelic lens of Brazilian psych-troupe Os Mutantes; the lesser material just sounds like lite Brian Wilson. [#243, p.59]

Holistically, there's nothing remarkably new here that hasn't been pursued before by this collective. The execution is nice and easily situates this album in the top two of their performances, and the sound quality far surpasses their previous efforts.