Animal Collective - Centipede Hz

I wonder how many times I’ve said (felt) this in past years but it just seems like this year is simply blowing by. It feels like it’s been a really strange year where a lot has happened, in fairly important aspects and still during it, seems like a struggling blur of fog. It definitely feels that way when I consider the 2012 music I’ve actually found, in comparison to years past, because objectively, I’ve simply found a lot less music this year.

That feels very sad in a way. But it highlights the music that I have been able to find, as some very awesome gems. And while, sure, it’s probably not anything earth-shattering new or ‘rare,’ the effect still seems to take on the same value as ever before and in the end, it feels whole. And to really juxtapose it, I’m planning (and have for a week now) on just mad-dashing it (getting as much as I can) to the end of the year.

Together, not as sad, but the main aim was to say: well I’ve found less (so far) but what I’ve found, it’s still very dear. And there was times where an album would consume my thoughts, mind and ears for a month at a time. I think this was mostly how Centipede Hz found me during the month of September and how we lived together throughout most of that month and some of October. And while yes, a lot of this reaching for the exact same album over and over – sure, I would sprinkle your obligatory regular selection from the library music (an LCD Soundsystem record here, 808s sometimes, a lot of Interpol for some reason and Wilco in the fall just sound right in the car) – is my own doing, it just seems entirely mutual and comfortable at the same time. I would never skip around and it always started from the beginning to the end – to where I was driving a dreary 35 MPH for the first two or three minutes of my drive, while the pounding of “Moonjock” just encompasses me, up until the drive home anywhere in between 7pm to whatever and these “Pulleys” just yanking away – and the whole album really kills.

I’d just say to listen to each of these selections if you can stomach them through entirety, unless you’re already a fan, and entirely consume them. What really floors me about “Applesauce” is the way it solidifies the album’s beginning and ties it to the middle, heart, of the album with a vivid, driving and fluid pace. A lot of complaints on this album were regarding the immediacy, reactionary or not, it’s definitely an afterthought when you truly consider the ever-shifting scope of their delivery. The song sings about the innocence of youth and feeling absolutely fantastic and yet, it questions the fast pace of our now-adult lives and how it all seems a blur (“I’m losing things so fast…”) to this hyper, tumultuous array of percussion drums and patterns. The song never truly finds a chorus or verse, and instead relentlessly pounds away in an almost circular feel.

And there’d be the nights where I’d lay in bed, in the dark sometimes sure, with the headphones grafted on and just getting lost inside of “Amanita” and its sincerely trippy exposure. Well Amanita can be two things, purely a mushroom that can be deadly sometimes, so the whole song could be about the escape/leap into death? And there is this Amanita Muscaria: the indigenous people of Russia would use this mushroom as some kind of entheogen (substance to go psycho on). So it could also be a reference to drugs and just how the feeling is. Either way, the song begins with a slow, trance-like pattern and rides on this high for the first half, before everything breaks away and explodes. The second half towers over with rapid percussion and a dance-like chanting that amazingly closes the album out. The entire time, the actual lyrics discuss jumping into a forest and running deep not returning “Until I can’t remember my name.” An uncontrollable feeling, the first half makes references to a time before technology and what will happen when all the blogs? close down. Very heady, sure, totally worth it. I’m glad it took over my crazy mind for a good month, it sure did it well.

No album version available, here is a live version with “My Girls” on the front half. Amanita around 6:50.  – Bryan