DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

Here's a little "trick" one can do to find out whether a song has a nice melody. Especially for a band like Animal Collective who adds a lot of background and electronic effects to their songs, a good idea is to try to find an unadorned version and see if the melody stands on its own. This is a great example here:

"In the Flowers" by Animal Collective. It actually has a quite beautiful melody - reminds me a lot of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, frankly. Here we have a completely unadorned version - just a vocalist singing against a piano.



Now add the modern arrangement and you get this. A lot more going on obviously, but beneath it, still the same beautiful melody. The trick is to find the beauty beneath the ornamentation. One must learn how to listen through the effects and focus on the core of the song. This is why I think songs like this are actually quite sophisticated: You cannot grasp the merits of the song on the first (or even second) listen, the songwriter is forcing you to listen to it carefully and mentally peel away some layers to find the song's inner beauty.



Then, once you've discovered the song's "inner beauty," the additional ornamentation makes more sense - it is adding atmosphere and complexity to a melody which is really fairly simple.

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Stop and find a pretty shell for her
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