JANUARY can be an indecisive month for new music, before the year’s trends and patterns have been set in aspic.

So, for their ninth studio album, Baltimore’s Animal Collective have pinned everything on the ideas board and somehow emerged with a clear sense of direction on a blissful, mesmerising kaleidoscopic album that leaps back and forth between The Beach Boys, big beats, electronica, folk and the grand experimentation of Beck at his most playful.

Songs are equally keen to jump about in their lyrics, their titles giving a clue to the wide focus: Summertime Clothes, Lion In A Coma, Also Frightened, In The Flowers. Melodious, mellifluous and magical, Merriweather Post Pavilion is ultimately a pop record, one for any weather, any time of day or night.

It makes you want to collect the previous nine albums, and feel guilty at letting these Animals escape your grasp in the past.