As one of the biggest, slickest commercial successes of the ’70s, the Mac may not, on the surface, seem like a natural influence on the noisy Animal Collective. But on 1979’s super-weird-for-a-pop-record Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham’s alternately fragmented and highly-detailed production and the band’s glinting harmonies struck an almost avant-garde balance between experimental abstraction and mass-appeal approachability. The distance between “My Girls” and, say, Tusk‘s marimba-echo jam “That’s All For Everyone” is best measured in time, not type.
