Animal Collective - Centipede Hz

I came into this listening with great anticipation because I wanted to love this album and be mesmorized by their innate awkwardness and specific creative atrocities on what we know as music. This band isn't getting the same blasts of love and success as Bon Iver and Arcade Fire but I find them much more invigorating and splendid than either of those two acts and constant critics darlings. 

The band have once again created something so un-mainstream and cool that the mainstream majority will probably dismiss it. Animal Collective’s madcap and vital new album Centipede Hz will likely divide fans into two lopsided camps: a mostly satisfied majority and those who hate it because it’s not Merriweather Post Pavilion. Fans with little familiarity with Animal Collective’s prolific output apart from Merriweather Post Pavilion, or with its member’s solo efforts, will have to brace themselves for a skittering, bonkers midway ride. For those familiar with the twists and turns of this changeling’s work, Centipede Hz’s stark departure will seem more like a natural progression, though one ostensibly juiced up by large doses of methamphetamine.

 Now considering my absolute love for music my friends will hate or not understand drives me towards bands like Animal Collective and their strange but true characteristics. The linear pulse, and a paring back of their signature kaleidoscopic Pet Sounds harmonies, might bum out the band's cult – people who took Merriweather as cause to go off their antidepressants. But fear not, hipster Hobbits, even when Animal Collective go "garage rock," it's still pure psych-rock Romper Room. 

This is a band that takes deep vocal influence from Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which ping-pongs from East Asian classical music to post-punk drum circles to gooey doinktronica, whose tripnotic circular rhythms (via Stewart Copeland fan Panda Bear) are often more like GIFs than grooves, which drops a jam called "Father Time" that sounds like Xavier Cugat playing an ashram.

What gives Centipede Hz its relatable gravity is that, this time out, Animal Collective sound more like creatures who put their skinny jeans on one hoof at a time. "Wonder how I even wrote this song/Does this not occur to almost everyone?" Tare sings on "Monkey Riches." For a band that usually seems to be eternally shambling toward transcendence, a shot of ambivalence is a brave new kind of pick-me-up.

As I previously stated this album won't be everyone's cup of java but when you like your caffeine mixed with delicious dairy and shots of syrup then this might just be what wakes your brain from that golden slumber to alert status red. Just shut up and listen to the album that will be the hipsters indie rock darling while knowing all along that hipsters know fuck all and you are just as cool as they think they are. Centipede Hz is an album by a group of guys who were the coolest guys in school that you didn't relate to because you were afraid to be that bloody awesome.