Animal Collective
Centipede Hz

LA RECENSIONE

...and that's what I did, as Panda Bear told me (the song is the wonderful New Town Bornout), I picked up the album and started listening, "Out of my body/ Out of my mind" to better grasp its nuances, simple gestures that give meaning to my day.

"Centipede Hz" comes out three years after the highly acclaimed "Merriweather Post Pavilion" and it wasn't easy to maintain the position after having greatly expanded their fan base. Who remembers the early neuropsychiatric cries, which first evolved into images ("Here Comes the Indian") and then into song form?

Animal Collective showed the way, they didn't really realize it, but they taught us a new way of making music. And a new way of listening to it.

Defragmentation.

Finding the right place for each individual sound, despite its indecipherable structure, and leading it back into a track.

Their "making music" is a continuous rotation of the kaleidoscope lens!

For this latest effort, they returned to Baltimore, to rebuild themselves as a band, distancing themselves from the alluring lights of Brooklyn; the prodigal son Deakin also returned to the base, singing solo for the first time in Wide Eyed, a mantra coming from the future.

The longest album of their nearly decade-long career, with a beginning, the Shuttle launch from NASA's Moonjock station, that seems to make you cry a miracle (another turning point?!) but then opens up towards the band's classic atmospheres, with sixties echoes as a base, upon which dense lysergic plots are built.

The joyful course of Applesauce is broken by a distorted guitar and Avey Tare's disordered screams, sometimes instead the vocal line remains very simple and melodic (Rosie Oh).

One doesn't even get bored in the almost seven minutes of Monkey Riches, an intriguing tribal rhythm doesn't allow stopping: you will dance all night!

The album reaches one of its highest points with the last song Amanita, "There's nothing to do, nothing to do, nothing to do/ Imagination floating around"... there's nothing we can do anyway.

The internet era, as we know, has opened new scenarios in the music world.

The number of bands we can reach today was unimaginable until a few years ago. Most of them always appear very cool, with a refined sound (even the most unsuspecting ones!) and with clothing that follows trends. Sometimes you hear something original, surprising; the rest is a sea without a breath of wind, a flat calm.

Animal Collective belongs to this world, but the substantial difference is that, they do what they do better than others.

"Centipede Hz" will certainly not be a revolutionary or surprising album, but it is crafted by meticulous masters, built with the coolest sound on the planet, and presented before you, dear listeners, almost like an exercise in style.