Description:	Reissue CD on Paw Tracks
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Experimental Indie
	Label:	Paw Tracks
	Price:	£11.29
	Availability:	Dispatched within 2-5 days (on average).

4
...according to our Business Lady on 21 January 2010.

I'm probably not the best person to review Animal Collective's 2003 album 'Campfire Songs' as I've still not really got to grips with the band. I own last yea'rs crowd pleasing 'Merriweather Post-Pavilion' but I'm not at all familiar with their back catalogue or the epic journey that bought them to my attention in the first place. 'Campfire Songs' is a stripped down early incarnation of the band and music is recorded outside, live and direct to mini disc in an attempt to bring the ambience of nature and the outdoors to an indoor listening experience. Featuring five original compositions, 'Campfire Songs' departs from the electronics heavy sound that I've become familiar with, abandoning it in favour of naturalist, acoustic arrangements that focus of melodic chants and wordless harmonies. I'm sure some of these ideas will have been explored by the group on the intervening albums between this and 'Merriweather....' but this is first time I've heard the band perform in such a loose and carefree manner and it sounds great. Reissue courtesy of Paw Tracks.

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Sound clips for Campfire Songs by Animal Collective: on CD at Norman Records UK. CD, Paw Tracks, PAW030CD, £11.29.

What their label says...

* Paw Tracks is proud to present the reissue of Animal Collective’s 2003 album Campfire Songs. Since the CD’s original issue on Catsup Plate recently went out of print it is our intention to simply keep the CD in print for as long as possible.

* An idea originally thought up by Dave Portner and Noah Lennox while in college, Campfire Songs is not a record of songs sung around a campfire but a record that hints at songs emerging from the fire itself: “We wanted to give the music the feeling and atmosphere of the outdoors and the warmth of a fire, so people could bring it indoors.”

* A collection of five songs written over a period of four to five years, Campfire Songs is an escape from the clutter and electronic assault of the group’s 2001 release Danse Manatee and the tour that preceded it. However, the tapestry quality of the songs and the lines that blur endings from beginnings and jams from compositions highlight a style that the boys had become comfortable with from touring and would continue to work on in the years that followed on records like Here Comes The Indian and Feels.

* While the songs were completed in the apartment that three of the members shared (Geologist does not play on this album) they chose to record the music on a screened-in porch in Maryland using portable mini disc players so as to allow the ambience of trees blowing in the wind, the birds chirping and the insects in the area to become an integral part of the sound flow. What remains intact are the melodies that have always been a part of the AC sound—though here they have been stripped away of any electronic accompaniment and stretched and slowed to a calmer place than anywhere AC had been before and perhaps has gone since.

* Tracklisting: 1. Queen In My Pictures 2. Doggy 3. Two Corvettes 4. Moo Rah Rah Rain 5. De Soto De Son