Speaking of the hipping of the mainstream (see my last post, on NPR's recent programming), David Letterman sure has some savvy music bookers working on his dime. They've got to be ex-college radio staffers or somesuch. Last week Animal Collective (pictured at left) was the musical guest.
  
Animal Collective performed "Summertime Clothes" (video clip below) from their new album, Merriweather Post Pavillion—an album that, in addition to shovelling in the hip critical plaudits, seems to to be turning on an entirely new audience. Apocryphal tales abound of gigs selling out in minutes, bigger venues, high-profile festival appearances, and magazine space aplenty. What exactly is going on here? Merriweather Post Pavillion is a very strange creature: rhythms skitter around nervously, synths glimmer in improbably geometric patterns, and the yelped vocals of Avey Tare and Panda Bear intertwine in a slow dance before scattering again to their separate corners of the padded playroom. 

The album is nowhere near as wigged out as past freak-flag touchstones like Heres Comes the Indian (2003), but it's still jarring hearing this music for the first time. It's not conventionally poppy or catchy or even linear, but it's reaching people. In many ways, it's a pleasurable and straightforward listening experience, a sign that the band is continuing to evolve, still tinkering with their sound, only with a bigger set of tools.

Surreally, Animal Collective seem to be in the strange position of becoming a Phish or a Widespread Panic for 21st-century "jam band" fans. Copious ink has already been spilled on this phenomenon (e.g., in this Boston Phoenix article), so I won't belabor the point, but folks who would've been grooving to Grafeful Dead bootlegs or wouldn've been front row at an Aquarium Rescue Unit show are now slowly flocking to the multicolor psychedelia that Animal Collective is peddling. Even if it is almost completely synthesized. And unlike fickle indie rock fans, the jam fanbase is doggedly loyal. Interesting times.