Album Review: Ballet Slippers [Live] by Animal Collective

A decade since Merriweather Post Pavilion, the qualities that once made Animal Collective singular--their gleeful nitrous-oxide harmonies, their cascading drums, their interlocking hooks--are as familiar as Instagram filters. The success of "Peacebone" and "My Girls" has overshadowed their unruly previous decade to the point where it can be hard to remember just how wild and transgressive Animal Collective were for so long. Those splendid eccentricities surface again on Ballet Slippers, a 12-song live mix culled from four shows a decade ago and sequenced into a simulacrum of a single concert.

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While almost every album they made took a wildly different approach, all of Animal Collective's strengths congealed on their 2009 watershed album Meriwether Post Pavilion. Early albums hinted at a core of melody but buried it so deeply beneath noisy experimentation or abstract folkiness, it often got lost. A perfect synthesis of electronic production, big beats, and Animal Collective's uniquely friendly weirdness, Meriwether Post Pavillion finally delivered a more accessible articulation of the band's fractured pop vision.

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