I bought the LP. It’s cool and it’s weird and strange and awesome and mind numbing.
From the new album: Centipede Hz (2012)
Lots of Stuff:
The concept of ‘play’ – that is in the dada-surrealist sense of the word – follows that by playing games we will open doors away from orthodoxy, breaking the shackles of rationalism so as to achieve true chaos, purity, nirvana. In this way, over the last decade Animal Collective have emerged as master surrealists. Experimental as they unpretentious, and resolutely altruistic, if there’s one word to describe the Baltimore four-piece it’s ‘playful’. And the games they played unlocked new ways of making pop music.
With 2008′s celebrated Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective consolidated a career’s worth of loosely tied brilliance, in such dazzling fashion that it took even longtime fans by surprise. Reinventing hippydom for the chemical generation, this was an album that burned when it should have dissolved, which laughed as the electric thud of childhood’s warm summer blood ran cold, which exploded at the very dead-end of peacefulness, and which at every stage rendered the listener an object inside, looking out. Merriweather Post Pavilion offered something extremely rare in the music world; a type of art inspired not by rebellion, adversity, misery or love, but awe. The awe of seeing the world for the first time – feeling everything all at once,just as a child would. It hung in a permanent hold of pre-sexual, epiphanic ecstasy; too involuntary, powerful and overwhelmingly sincere to be considered twee.
Four years after Merriweather Post Pavilion, today sees the return of Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Avey Tare (David Portner), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz), who January past decamped to El Paso, TX with the intention of, once again, pulling the rug from underneath pop music. Amongst 2012′s most eagerly anticipated albums, co-produced by the band and MPP‘s Ben Allen, Centipede Hz marks a transition from the reverbed ambient of past albums into more rough’n’ready climes. Every song on Centipede Hz was designed to be played in a live setting, making AC’s 9th studio album unlike anything that’s preceded it, building on MPP‘s panoramic scope but altering the formula in myriad ways. They do play their little games.