Sung Tongs

AlbumMay 31 / 200412 songs, 52m 56s
Freak Folk Neo-Psychedelia Avant-Folk
Popular Highly Rated

Prepare to enter the world of your inner child, where words are rendered meaningless and every sight and sound is wonderfully new—that\'s the feel of this colorful 2004 album. Chiming, folky fingerpicking weaves through Avey Tare and Panda Bear\'s close harmonies on \"The Softest Voice\" and \"Mouth Wooed Her,\" while assorted sounds (and their own voices) get twisted and looped into giddy exhaustion. Still, it all feels incredibly organic, like two children gleefully running through a forest (\"Good Lovin Outside\") before sitting by the campfire to clap and strum in celebration (\"We Tigers\").

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-pulses.

8.9 / 10

Check out our album review of Artist's Sung Tongs on Rolling Stone.com.

On Sung Tongs, their first record distributed by FatCat, the two-man Animal Collective come on like sun-scorched acid eaters gathered around the campfire, strumming and grinning while they weave their material out of cyclical singalongs and tight harmonies.

8 / 10

I hope I'm not the only person who gets pinwheel eyes and a big wet Pavlovian tongue when Sung Tongs is on the stereo.

10 / 10

Magnificent, shape-shifting psych-folk