What a long, strange trip it’s been to this moment in music. The headlines are all too familiar – major labels are dying, download this, download that, blahblahblah… All the hubbub over technology and filthy lucre has obscured what is becoming increasingly clear: 2009 may be the best year for music in a decade – a veritable golden age, if you will, captured in a twelve-month period.

Two of today’s most buzzed about bands, Passion Pit and Animal Collective, are uniquely talented. However, their sounds also hark back to some previous outfits, which perhaps didn’t have the same cross-genre appeal, or maybe its just that those genres are being proven irrelevant these days. Regardless, its fun to explore the obvious overlap, and maybe the find the source of their individual influences.