In their Sung Tongs incarnation, Animal Collective is once again the duo of Avey tare and Panda Bear, and this is perhaps their most perfect, accessible work to date, a luscious flowering and flowing together of deeply catchy, hook-filled songs and intricately textured arrangements.
Built around the core elements of Avey and Panda's gorgeous vocal harmonies and twin acoustic guitar strumming, the album has been lovingly worked through the studio to provide a rich and fully expansive mix of stunning sonic depth, detail and placement.
Recorded in a house in rural Colorado, and engineered and mixed by Rusty Santos, Sung Tongs is a dazzling, bold and adventurous pop album. Diverse in its scope and yet fully coherent, the album moves from chiming acoustic guitar songs to gentler, more dispersed picked ballads, to sprawling, guitar-swell psychedelics, bubbling, acid-warped vocal fx, and tribal, almost shamanic trance-outs based around looping vocals and hypnotic kick-pulse.