Painting With by Animal Collective
"Painting With" is the tenth studio album by American experimental pop band Animal Collective, released on February 19, 2016 on the Domino label. The album is a follow-up to Centipede Hz (2012), and features contributions from John Cale and Colin Stetson. Three singles have been issued from the album: "FloriDada" (2015), "Lying in the Grass", and "Golden Gal" (both 2016). Painting With received mostly positive reviews from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 71, based on 32 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".
The tenth album from fearless kitchen-sink experimentalists Animal Collective builds on a sound the band first explored on 2012’s <i>Centipede Hz</i>: bouncy, busy, colourful psych-pop for a post-guitar generation. Opening with the most immediate song they’ve ever recorded (“FloriDada”), <i>Painting With</i> strips away the meandering naturalism of <i>Sung Tongs</i> and the cavernous ambience of <i>Merriweather Post Pavilion</i> for a carbonated, synth-heavy sound conjuring '50s sci-fi soundtracks (“Hocus Pocus”), '80s video-game music (“The Burglars”) and something from just beyond tomorrow (“Lying in the Grass”). It’s an album that retains the band’s idiosyncratic sweetness while managing to be unusually direct.
