Animal finds its voice

Animal Collective

“Merriweather Post Pavilion”

Domino

* * * 1/2

With its eighth studio release, urban tribalist Animal Collective has distilled an album of its purest songs yet. “Merriweather Post Pavilion” shines a light into Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist’s subterranean world of labyrinthine freakadelia, banishing some of the ghosts that have haunted it before.

The indie community and some mainstream outlets have celebrated the album with Pentecostal-like fever, which is surprising, considering that “Merriweather Post Pavilion” isn’t a new sound for Animal Collective, only the best iteration to date. It shows how far editing -- and a core group of fanatics -- can take a band.

Certain aural tattoos remain on the New York outfit’s collective skin. The banshee wails, the blood-pumping-in-the-ears rhythms, the straight MDMA hits of melody, but Avey Tare and Panda Bear dispense with most of their creepy vocal tics. Instead, they take the breezy harmonies of Panda Bear’s 2007 solo outing, “Person Pitch,” and blow them out like colorful bulbs of glass.

“My Girls” is a stomping, echo-drenched blast; “Summertime Clothes” is a sweaty, glittery hallucination. Both of them groove with a cool wetness, rivulets of rhythm streaming down their surfaces like water running down a cave’s walls.

Animal Collective still struggles with effective counterweights to its euphoric beauty -- the attempt at romance on “Bluish” is off-putting and some of the murkiness can exhaust and undermine -- but it shifts so rapidly that it’s more fun to hunker down and surrender.

-- Margaret Wappler

Perfect sounds from Bird

Andrew Bird

“Noble Beast”

Fat Possum Records

* * *

In such lean times, it’s a pleasure to have something as generous as Andrew Bird’s “Noble Beast.” The Chicago-based singer/songwriter/violinist has tiptoed at the edges of making a definitive record for many albums. On “Noble Beast,” he pares back his self-consciously virtuosic playing and focuses on perfect sounds and turns of melody.

During his live sets, Bird builds rafters-shaking string arrangements with the aid of a looping pedal, but on “Beast” he treats his violin as one complementary instrument among many. “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” adds grimy drum loops and sun-damaged Tropicalia guitar to his repertoire, while “Nomenclature” swells to a climax of vocal harmonies and ambient distortion.

Even his more traditional fare feels refined to essential ideas, like on “Tenuousness,” where Bird’s operatic whistling sidles up to front-porch guitar picking. This isn’t Bird’s “pop” record per se; his affection for lyrics like “From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans” would have a hard run at radio. But “Beast” is his most instantly inviting album by far and vividly underscores his skills as a producer.

-- August Brown

An exquisite prayer to Earth

Antony and the Johnsons

“The Crying Light”

Secretly Canadian

* * * *

Nature versus nurture: The eternal dichotomy haunts Antony Hegarty, the milky-voiced star of post-millennial art song. His transgendered image and aggressively beautiful music force a confrontation with the very idea of the natural. On “The Crying Light,” the follow-up to the internationally acclaimed 2005 release “I Am a Bird Now,” Antony and his chamber ensemble take the organic world as a subject, decrying humanity’s violence against the goddess Gaia while celebrating the bond between the wordless, magical Earth and its many strange mutations -- especially the artist himself.

From the opening track, which suggests one of William Blake’s poems reinterpreted by a coloratura Snow White, through songs that challenge fears of disease (“Epilepsy Is Dancing”), birth, death, erotic ecstasy and even the apocalypse (the stately lament “Another World,” also the title track of a 2008 EP), Antony follows in the Romantic tradition of celebrating nature as a psychic salve. The songs, set in tastefully fecund arrangements by composer Nico Muhly, relate the singer’s evolving consciousness to the planet’s life cycle.

It’s the most personal environmentalist statement possible, making an unforeseen connection between queer culture’s identity politics and the green movement. As music, it’s simply exquisite -- more controlled and considered than anything Antony and the Johnsons have done and sure to linger in the minds of listeners for more than a season.

-- Ann Powers

Enchanting and moving

Mark O’Connor’s

Hot Swing Trio

“Live in New York”

Omac Records

* * * 1/2

The amazing thing about fiddler-composer Mark O’Connor is that he’d be equally at home on stage playing country with George Jones, jazz with Wynton Marsalis or classical music with Itzhak Perlman. For this third outing with guitarist Frank Vignola and bassist Jon Burr, O’Connor’s starting point is the fleet-fingered swing of his mentor, French violinist Stephane Grappelli, and the great Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.

The session opens with a couple of jazz-pop standards, George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” and Ray Noble’s “Cherokee,” before moving on to O’Connor’s contiguous suite “Anniversary,” an 11-minute journey rooted in the blues and flowing seamlessly through swing, free-form jazz and traditional folk.

His “M & W Rag” is a thoroughly enchanting bounce in the style of Scott Joplin, and “Fiddler Going Home” is an ode to one of O’Connor’s heroes, Claude “Fiddler” Williams.

Any breath the listener might have left after that is quickly taken away by the breakneck “Gypsy Fantastic,” and the hourlong set, recorded in 2004, wraps with a positively dazzling run through another American classic, “Tiger Rag.”

O’Connor’s facility as a composer allows him to craft artfully constructed statements rather than overwhelming listeners with his remarkable technique, and his empathy with his skilled cohorts are the sure signs of a consummate musician.

-- Randy Lewis