Then: This was absolutely mind-blowing around 2004. I had never heard anything quite like Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, which was sort of experimental folk music, lots of weird droning acoustic guitars and bizarre vocal affectations. I was absolutely blown away and tried repeatedly to make an album that was basically a big ol' rip-off of it (I think we were going to call is NUJV). I remember going to see them live and describing them to a guy in line who was only there for the headliner (Black Dice, I think?) as "Can with acoustic guitars." The rest of their records sounded absolutely nothing like this one, and for the most part I gave up on the Collective after about 2005, but there was a year or so when this was my life.
Now: Ehh...Sung Tongs is okay, but nowhere near as good as I remember. Maybe it's just because I've discovered Comus and The Incredible String Band since, but their 'unsettling acoustic' schtick doesn't feel nearly as fresh as it did at the time...hell, singer Avey Tare even sounds like the dude from Comus. Speaking of which, Jesus Christ, the lyrics on this album are straight-up awful, some of the most mind-numbing poetry I've ever heard. If you ever needed proof that doing drugs makes you an absolutely atrocious poet, give a couple tracks from Sung Tongs a spin (or, as always, Kemialliset Ystävät, which is so bad that I have to believe is intentional). The last couple A Screaming Comes Across the Sky albums were fairly psychedelic folk influenced, so Sung Tongs remains an album that affected my music, but these days I look at it more like a record that got me to find records from OTHER bands that are, for lack of a better word, much better.
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