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January 13, 2009 - Sometime in December, weeks before its actual release, everyone seemed to decide that Animal Collective's new disc, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was the best album of 2009. It was probably inevitable: The band's past releases were happy and complicated and frequently amazing, but they were also hard to digest, with overstuffed mixes of psych-folk, electro, surf-pop, African rhythms, '70s art rock and more. Yet Merriweather Post Pavilion inflates Animal Collective's likable qualities and dispenses with the sort of preciousness that's tough to avoid when a band features someone named Panda Bear.

The result is a hoot, and the delirious, comparatively contained "My Girls" functions as the album's most accessible track, possessing everything good about Merriweather Post Pavilion writ small: It's relatively brief (under six minutes), it's got a killer hook (there are about 10 lines in the entire song, repeated over and over, so it's nothing but hook) and, for a band that can tend toward the theoretical, it's a surpassingly warm, infectiously joyous ode to settling down that almost single-handedly justifies the hype.

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