Animal Collective Doesn't Care About Cool

Merriweather Post Pavilion made Animal Collective one of the most hyped bands of 2009, but the follow-up Fall Be Kind EP sounds almost aggressively unconcerned with indie cred. The first song includes a flute solo from Zamfir, one of those ubiquitous infomercial pan-flute players, while a later track samples the Grateful Dead. "Cool? These guys aren't sweating it,” writes Mark Richardson for Pitchfork.

Fall Be Kind flows surprisingly well for a record of outtakes from Merriweather Post Pavilion—moving from the unabashed melodicism of "What Would I Want? Sky" (the Dead-sampling track) to the more abstract territory of “Bleed” and “On a Highway.” Fall Be Kind shows a band still driven to experiment, to go into “unfamiliar realms,” Richardson writes, even if it means failure. “There's still a sense of gamble with Animal Collective—and that's exactly what makes them an especially exciting band.”