Animal Collective

It’s telling that, these days, Animal Collective comes up as a reference in more reviews than as an actual subject. The Baltimore-bred, New York-based collective has been active for about a decade, but it wasn’t until 2004’s exotic-sounding Sung Tongsthat the band began earning real critical acclaim. After extensive touring and four subsequent albums in the intervening years (including 2007’s evolvedStrawberry Jam and 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion), the noise-pop band has arrived at its present iconic status as a band to which others are compared, rather than the other way around

Updated 07/07/2011