One of the most remarkable stories in music so far this year has been the ascension of Animal Collective from a band revered in know-it-all indie rock circles to one that is being talked about in terms of Next-Big-Thing status. Whatever the metric is these days for measuring whether a band has climbed from the level of cult status to something bigger, Animal Collective has at least moved a few notches up it this year.

Merriweather Post Pavilion, the band’s ninth album, has been something of a minor phenomenon. The album’s release last month was met with near-unanimous praise from critics and bloggers. Never mind that it officially dropped only three weeks into the year, some critics have already declared that it will likely be the best album released in all of 2009.

This sort of breathless critical fawning over a band that makes decidedly weird music (at least compared to standard mainstream fare) is usually reserved for Radiohead—think Kid A, rather than more recent output. The big difference, of course, is that Radiohead is an internationally famous band with a massive following and just performed at the Grammy’s. Animal Collective is not really famous, not in that way. It only seems like it.

Over the course of its nine albums, Animal Collective—originally from Baltimore, then based in New York and now spread across three cities and two continents—has built a following that has grown in both numbers and obsession. Their concerts in New York now sell out in minutes. Tickets to these sold-out shows are then re-sold for outrageously steep prices. Blog posts about Animal Collective elicit hundreds of comments that break out into self-righteous, quasi-political debates about the merits of their music, their fans, the critics, while also never failing to engage in the time honored pastime of picking apart the world for phoniness—a pastime that was of course first handed down by Holden Caulfield. There’s also a web page dedicated to deciphering the often-esoteric lyrics of almost every song the band has ever released. (It’s worth noting that Animal Collective has never included a lyric sheet with any of their albums and their vocals are so idiosyncratic that interpreting what exactly is being sung seems mostly impossible. In other words, you have to really be into this band to sit down and figure this stuff out.)

By looking at Animal Collective through the lens of relentless internet hype, however, critics and fans are losing focus of the real story. Music writers have written quite a bit about what music writers think about the band, as if to confirm and marvel at and reject the hype all at once. They are missing the point completely. Animal Collective is not an overnight success story. The trajectory of Animal Collective has nothing in common with newer blog-hyped bands like Vampire Weekend—bands that have seen their music go through the cycle of hyperbolic praise and backlash in a matter of months.

Animal Collective is instead the rarest of breeds: An intensely original indie band that has followed its own complex muse long enough that a bigger audience has finally caught up to them. Nine albums over nine years is a pretty serious output. Their accessibility to a larger fan base has not grown because they started making more commercial music, but because their music has simply evolved so much over nine years. It’s more accessible, yes, but it’s not commercial.

The media swarm over Animal Collective is bound to encourage a tenor of backlash far louder than is warranted given that the band, for all of its critical praise and its ever-expanding rabid fan base, still only occupies a relatively small spot on the map of popular music. The backlash will also be unwarranted because Merriweather Post Pavilion truly is a fantastic album. It is not pop, as some have tried to argue, but it is melodic, inventive and intricately layered. There is nothing else to compare it to because it sounds like nothing else being made.

Animal Collective’s early albums would often drift into nosier, less overtly melodic and much more insular territory. Starting with Sung Tongs (2004), the band began showing signs that it was ready to bring to the forefront the melodic hooks that had previously only been hinted at on earlier albums. The next two albums, Feels (2005) and Strawberry Jam (2007), continued the rhythmic evolution that culminated with Merriweather. It’s hard to think of another indie band that has tweaked its sound over each successive album to the extent that Animal Collective has done.

The masterpiece status that has been bestowed upon Merriweather is probably justified, but what is startling about the band’s body of work is that its debut album is no less ambitious than its latest one. In 2000, Avey Tare (David Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), the two principal songwriters for Animal Collective, released a complicated, astonishingly accomplished bedroom album called Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. It is maybe a concept album about childhood or growing up or rebelling against growing up. A shambolic mixture of synthesizer, acoustic guitar, piano and drums flows with Portner’s strange vocals that swing between plaintive falsettos to sharp screams and distorted washouts. When Portner’s words can be clearly understood they are often haunting: “The winter clouds will do no harm, but I’ve been loved,” he sings in “Alvin Row,” the epic closer on the album. Spirit They’re Gone sounds like a psychedelic fairytale. To this day it sounds like almost nothing out there. It also sounds like a masterpiece.

Only not that many people were listening back then. And now a lot of people are listening. The evolution has been a slow, natural build. Hype is irrelevant. The story of Animal Collective is of a visionary band chasing a singular sound while the world has grown larger around them.

Paul Menchaca is co-editor of Last Exit Magazine.

Copyright Last Exit 2009