Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	83/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Alternative Press	4/5
The Boston Phoenix
Mojo
Now	4/5
Pitchfork Media	8.9/10
PopMatters	8/10
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Uncut

Sung Tongs is the fifth studio album by American experimental pop band Animal Collective, released on May 3, 2004 by FatCat Records. Sung Tongs is generally considered to be Animal Collective's breakthrough release; it generated much praise from critics upon its release and was featured in best-of lists at the end of 2004 and the decade of the 2000s.

Only two of the band's four members play on it: Avey Tare (David Portner) and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), a first since Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished (2000), which was originally credited to the duo and only later retroactively classified as part of the band's discography.

On the Collected Animals message board, Portner talks about the recording equipment [1]:

"Yeah, we recorded it on the same tascam 48 (half inch 8 track) that I recorded Spirit on and the drums guitars and early electronics for Danse Manatee. That is we recorded the acoustic guitars and the vocals on 8 tracks. Then we mixed it down on Rusty's laptop and recorded many vocal and percussion over dubs. He's been using that for years. We mixed it from that onto....something..(i cant remember) at Noah's mom's place in Baltimore. It was very cold so we had to wear jackets the whole time. We added in all those samples and electronics there. We mixed for awhile so its sweet you like the mixing. Oh and we used AKGs and an old ribbon mike to record with. Though we had a pzm and some sm57s that we might have used as well. I remember using the pzm to record me slamming the door of the house which is what that distorted rhythm track in kids on holiday is. The person talking at the beginning of Who Could Win A Rabbit is someone in a deli in my neighborhood."

Moreover, they used exclusively red light during the recording process. Portner explains at the same place:

Lots of singing and messing around with doing vocals in all parts of a room. It was basically like a two bedroom house but the living room was all cement...thats where we recorded and the bedroom was where we set up the mixer. Its on the property that my parents live on in Lamar, Colorado. We rented a bunch of mics here in nyc and took my eight track out there with us. Rusty [Santos] would just listen to every song as we would play it live and walk around the room for a while and then decide how he'd want to mike the guitars. Noah and I both did the percussion during over dubs throughout the session as well.

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