Your Review
CRITIC REVIEWS
85
The album is beautifully conceived, and works great as a listen in one sitting. Close your eyes and let the uncanny yet strangely funny sea creatures flit around.
2mo
80
Tangerine Reef is a project that may likely polarize Animal Collective fans, and it may not be an ideal jumping-off point for anyone looking to discover this unique band, but it's a worthy addition to their catalog, and it supports a supremely important cause in this day and age.
2mo
80
Fans of AnCo’s more upbeat and animated works probably won’t love this album, but it is successful in its experimentation and as an affirmation that they have and always will have something unique to bring to the table.
2mo
78
It's not necessarily a masterpiece nor was it ever meant to be a grand statement that'd capture everyone's attention; a low-key unveiling is more fitting, for it's the Collective's return to form, except in a way that nobody expected.
2mo
70
The result is an album steeped in murky ambiance and stuffy reverb, celestial and ghostly, minute details strewn across the soundwaves to emulate the floating presences of the minute, drifting sea creatures.
2mo
70
Like any visual album, the floating sounds here are probably best experienced in conjunction with the visuals they were created for, but even on their own, there's a calm power that grows as the various passages of Tangerine Reef fade in and out of one another.
2mo
69
The music itself is beautiful and expansive, if slow and occasionally stagnant, and the perspective it asks you to take offers relief from the anxious refrain of climate doom.
2mo
62
With Tangerine Reef, Animal Collective’s second audiovisual album, the band leans deep into its nautical tendencies, crafting a surreal soundtrack for “avant-garde coral macro-videography” (read: underwater footage of coral reefs).
2mo
60
For fans of Animal Collective's trippier inclinations, Tangerine Reef is a pleasant bit of oceanic escapism. For new listeners or anyone looking for the next "My Girls," this is decidedly inessential.
3mo
60
I have no doubt that Tangerine Reef will be a remarkable experience when paired with its visual stimuli, but without it, it is an album hard to recommend.
2mo
60
This is the most relaxed and easygoing thing they’ve billed as a full album in over a decade.
2mo
60
This might not be as immediate and catchy as previous Animal Collective releases, possibly due to Panda Bear’s absence, but its one of their most transfixing and beguiling.
2mo
60
Tangerine Reef has its moments, but it veers in and out of being truly engaging all on its own.
2mo
50
While Tangerine Reef inspires as a pseudo-political statement regarding the deteriorating environment at the hands of mankind, Animal Collective ultimately disappoints with this record—it’s yet another forgettable checkpoint within the band’s recent run.
2mo
50
Too much of Tangerine Reef feels like ambient murk in service of nothing.
2mo
43
The worst way to engage with Tangerine Reef is by listening to it.
2mo
40
As an environmental art project raising awareness of endangered coral (it commemorates the 2018 International Year of the Reef), it is laudable. As a listening experience, it is impenetrable.
2mo
40
In search, perhaps, of something more profound than the Beach Boys-haunted lo-fi surrealism of early albums, or the fizzing avant-garde electropop that became their calling card after 2009 breakthough album Merriweather Post Pavilion, AC plumb depths of paucity more than subtlety in this wilfully desolate expanse of dispassionate vocals and vague, awkward ambience.
2mo
30
Tangerine Reef is more like the sound of pretending to experience something profound.
1mo
20
By the end of its relentlessly boring sonic onslaught, you may be the one that feels like an endangered species.
2mo
Tangerine Reef is one of Animal Collective's most conceptually intriguing albums in years. The band has underwhelmed listeners with each and every effort since Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album which struck as one of the group's most accessible to date and one which had some of their biggest songs to date (namely "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes"), and it's no surprise that this particular release is being equally as divisive.
Animal Collective's earlier material has ... read more
Animal Collective's earlier material has ... read more
It's been two months and I still haven't rated this. I doubt I ever will at this point, honestly.
Promise Broken.
Promise Broken.
Painting With was saccharine and effervescent, this is polar opposite, a tangential nightmarish atmosphere. Both records match the polarizing experimentation of their predecessors, but unlike them amount to forgettable, inconsequential affairs.
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...this album sucks.
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...this album sucks.
Boy, they are struggling to stay relevant, aren't they?
Track List
- Hair Cutter
- Buffalo Tomato
- Inspector Gadget
- Buxom
- Coral Understanding
- Airpipe (To a New Transition)
- Jake and Me
- Coral by Numbers
- Hip Sponge
- Coral Realization
- Lundsten Coral
- Palythoa
- Best of Times (Worst of All)
Added on: July 8, 2018
