na: Animal Collective, Franz Ferdinand, MGMT

Great new music, big names today. I’ll give a partial rundown, and then you guys tell me what you found, as usual….let’s go!

Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind – Is it incumbent upon me by an obscure Law of Hackery to observe “The Fall is certainly being kind to Animal Collective lovers!” ? Fall or no, new Animal Collective is undeniably an event, and this, like Merriweather Post Pavilion, is basically summer music, in love with the feeling of warm sun on skin and in thrall to the endless sky. Despite all the yelping/whooping shenanigans of their Sung Tongs era, they have moved a lot closer post-MPP to the blissed-out visions of eternity of Meredith Monk than ever before.

Franz Ferdinand, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand -The latest from these Glasgow lads seems them slipping a little further into dissolution, with all the accompanying coked-up synths such a move implies. There will be a review of this up tomorrow.

Tortoise, Beacons of Ancestorship – Tortoise returns! Douglas Wolk writes:

Beacons of Ancestorship is hungry and adventurous, augmenting the frictionless timbre-juggling they pioneered a decade and a half ago with messy, growling low end. In 2006, as they were beginning to write material for this album, they performed their 1996 album Millions Now Living Will Never Die in concert, and some of that epochal record’s vibe filtered down to the new material … Beacons‘ highlights, though, are some of the loudest and heaviest grooves Tortoise has ever played: “Northern Something” is a snarling little synth line, attacked with two drum kits until it snaps to attention, and “Yinxianghechengqi” is a misshapen bass riff examined from every possible angle, run through some cracklingly nasty distortion, and sped up until it shakes to pieces.

MGMT, Oracular Spectacular – The Brooklyn-via-Wesleyan electro-rock darlings’ Dave Fridmann-produced opus hits eMusic! I was never too into this band, but plenty of people love them something crazy…what do you think of ‘em?

Oh No, Dr. No’s Ethiopium – At long last, it’s actually here! The long-awaited and anticipate sequel to 2007’s brilliant Dr. No’s Oxperiment, this time chopping up Ethiopian funk. This is looooong, but it sounds like there is a king’s ransom-worth of killer moments in it.

V/A, Daptone Gold – Killer comp of Daptone singles and rarities. Here is Michaelangelo Matos:

If the intention of Daptone Gold is to prove that the Brooklyn retro-funk label has a far wider remit than it’s often given credit for, it succeeds handsomely. Most of these gospel, soul, African-manqué, and ballad selections, were either singles or album cuts — though Binky Griptite with the Sugarman Three’s “A Lover Like Me,” recorded in 2002, and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ cover of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Giving Up,” from 2008, are previously unissued –and all of them are of a piece.

Boris, Japanese Heavy Rock Hits .3 – “16:47:52″ – Sludge metal/doom rock legends return!

Lenka, S/t — Starry-eyed Australian folk-pop. Maris Kreizman says, in a review that will be live tomorrow:

Australian singer Lenka is no starry-eyed ingénue. So what if her cutie-pie vocals stir up images of Kewpie dolls and bunny rabbits? Her voice may be sweet, but underneath the adorable exterior it seems that Lenka is more than a little familiar with life’s bitterness: with disappointments, with loneliness. But instead of crying about it, she’s figuring out a way to combat misery: with optimism so irrepressible it’s like she’s flipping sadness the bird. Her self-titled debut is a virtual parade of exuberantly hooky pop songs engineered to help her brush off — if not quite eradicate — those pesky undercurrents of sorrow. She lays out her masterplan in the breezily buoyant song “Skipalong”: “Keep smiling knowing all the while/the world will fall apart.” The lyrics are sad, but they’re delivered with a happy-go-lucky shrug instead of a whimper.

Those are the big ones. What else did we pick up?