Collected Animals

When I first heard this album I thought of it as a disappointment. I thought some of the vocals were too loud and annoying, and the songs uninspiring.
Now I hear the album differently. It's great on headphones too.

Here is my alternative track order of the album:

A1: Honeycomb
A2: Mercury Man
A3: Rosie Oh
A3: Applesauce
A5: Crimson
A6: Father Time
B1: New Town Burnout
B2: Monkey Riches
B3: Gotham
B4: Amanita

And it's about 48 minutes which is a great length. Also, the album would've done much better with this sequence. Maybe I thought it about it out a bit much.
What are your thoughts on Centipede Hz?

Gotham should've been on the album. Best CHz track

Also the lyrics have definitely grown on me. I think on Monkey Riches the words were "I make a monkey rich!" {which sounds fergalicious to me personally}... I think the words actually go "I am making monkey riches." Right? I might be wrong.

He alternates between "make a monkey rich" and "make a monkey wretch".\

I think I like all three of the non-album tracks (Honeycomb, Gotham, and Crimson) better than most of the songs on the actual album (except for maybe New Town Burnout, Applesauce and Pulleys).

I actually think I still think most of the songs are good (though I don't like Monkey Riches very much), but the whole album is exhausting to listen to.

I listened to it last week and enjoyed a lot. It is mature and solid, now I think it's maybe their best shape.
Though I like Floridada much, I kind of miss this CHz era already.

I had problems with Mercury Man before, now it's fine.

a ton of people say Honeycomb in particular is better than the entirity of chz and i can't really argue that..
but there are so many great moments in that album and i think the entire concept of it is really cool. it's really overloaded for a reason and some people just aren't into that i guess.
but man Monkey Riches is one of my favorite tracks by them ever... there's so much energy in it and it feels so whole.
and i've been listening to this album for what, 3 years, and i just recently noticed the piano in Applesauce? i wish i could hear it apart from the rest of the music, it sounds so silly and cute.

I think they're all really well written songs, maybe just a little too cluttered and overproduced in some parts

the alternative drumset gets really tiring i think

I was surprised when Geo put Portishead on his CHz mix, even though PB had already listed them on his PP liner notes. The influence shows on NTB and Monkey Riches.

Today's Supernatural rips as well. What a raucous, rattling joint. Good album

the alternative drumset gets really tiring i think

ya the bongos are one of the main reasons i stopped listening to the record as early as i did. only so much rattling rolls on one of two tones i can take.

ntb and pulleys are standouts - mercury man was so close, and wide eyed/father time/monkey riches are no-go's for me. wtf happened w/ rosie oh.. too much gobbledigook with the vocals. it's a solid, fun, short pandy track but they buried it in effects and noises.

exhausting is the best word for it. listening from the get-go, i very rarely want to keep listening once father time starts, even tho my favs are on the back-end of the record.

it's still better than most stuff in my library, and i have listened to it countless times, but for an AC release, it has the most misses/decisions i don't vibe with.

I really got into chz for a while when it came out, but now I mainly pass over most of those tracks when I'm shuffling. I still listen to NTB and wide eyed, they're my tops. and of course i think honeycomb tops all of them

moonjock
todays supernatural
rosie oh
honeycomb
applesauce
new town burnout
monkey riches
gotham


is the perfect track list for me.

the album would start and end with the loud guitar riffs..kinda come full circle. and it would keep the energy up the whole way through but shorten the length so its not too overloaded. and the last three would have a darker vibe.

but overall the album has some fantastic ac songs and is still one of my favs

pulleys shoulda been on campfire songs but other than that i wouldnt change a thing

I like rosie oh a loooooot

I've gone into considerable depth on this one on several occasions. Essentially, my final conclusion is that by substituting Wide Eyed, Father Time and Monkey Riches for Honeycomb, Gotham and Crimson, you've got a much stronger set of songs, though not necessarily sequenced as straight swaps.

I think that these songs also much better suit the stated intention of the record, and match the likes of Moonjock, Mercury Man, Today's Supernatural from a tonal/world building point of view. They all have that dusty, sticky Mad Max vibe. Now, there's an issue in that the songs I've removed fit much better with Applesauce, Rosie Oh and Pulleys. They all have a kind of cartoony tropical vibe, Monkey Riches aside. I can live with this but it does suggest that the original vision became distorted along the way, or that they just didn't follow through with it. I don't mind that, I'll always choose songs over concept.

This leaves NTB as the key anomaly, and also the best song, which kind of sums up CHz, for me. I think it wasn't an especially fertile songwriting period for any of them, and the immediate move to solo projects seemed like a way to get it out of their system quickly. Clearly, I'm presuming a great deal there but Dave has mentioned that Slasher Flicks was a conscious attempt to nail the style which was intended on CHz, while Noah (who was almost a reluctant songwriter on CHz - thought Rosie Oh was crap, NTB appears to have been a Tomboy reject) just ditched the style completely.

Pettier, equally subjective gripes include the drum sounds and the overabundance of triplets and rolls, but I guess that's pretty personal. If you don't like rim sounds, Feels could be irritating, I suppose, but it did seem that Noah employed similar fills all over the record. Again, NTB has the most interesting and unique rhythm and sound.

I also think that the production failed to build a world that I wanted to inhabit. I found the instrumentation quite generic, with layers upon layers of squelches and indistinguishable keyboard/guitar. You then had a shit load of redundant Moog bass which made things worse, and all the interesting stuff towards the top end was just swamped. I liked the vocals but again it was hard to make out the more interesting effects and delivery because they were presented as quite thin and reedy to find a place within the mix. Compare that with Danse Manatee where they're equally thin and reedy, but they're in their own space and are therefore very striking.

I think NTB and Applesauce are both stunning, though, and the bridge/middle eight of Today's Supernatural is as good as anything else they've done, it winds ecstatically to deeper heights.

The only songs that I skip are Father Time and Wide Eyed. I just don't care for Father Time's melody and Wide Eyed is too repetitive and long for my tastes, there's not enough payoff.
Having said that, I think Applesauce, Gotham, Amanita, Crimson, Moonjock, and Mercury Man are some of the band's best.
I think the main problem most people have is the overwhelming amount of sounds, it can feel a little congested. Perhaps they could have been EQ'd better to have a "cleaner" sound, but clearly that is not the record the dudes wanted to make.

i like wide eyed.
sorry to say that's the only thing i like.

I like all the songs. Monkey Riches and Rosie Oh got me into AC so I'd say they're two of my favorites. Also NTB and Mercury Man. Really all of the 2nd half is gr8

gotham is so good

I've gone into considerable depth on this one on several occasions. Essentially, my final conclusion is that by substituting Wide Eyed, Father Time and Monkey Riches for Honeycomb, Gotham and Crimson, you've got a much stronger set of songs, though not necessarily sequenced as straight swaps.

I think that these songs also much better suit the stated intention of the record, and match the likes of Moonjock, Mercury Man, Today's Supernatural from a tonal/world building point of view. They all have that dusty, sticky Mad Max vibe. Now, there's an issue in that the songs I've removed fit much better with Applesauce, Rosie Oh and Pulleys. They all have a kind of cartoony tropical vibe, Monkey Riches aside. I can live with this but it does suggest that the original vision became distorted along the way, or that they just didn't follow through with it. I don't mind that, I'll always choose songs over concept.

This leaves NTB as the key anomaly, and also the best song, which kind of sums up CHz, for me. I think it wasn't an especially fertile songwriting period for any of them, and the immediate move to solo projects seemed like a way to get it out of their system quickly. Clearly, I'm presuming a great deal there but Dave has mentioned that Slasher Flicks was a conscious attempt to nail the style which was intended on CHz, while Noah (who was almost a reluctant songwriter on CHz - thought Rosie Oh was crap, NTB appears to have been a Tomboy reject) just ditched the style completely.

Pettier, equally subjective gripes include the drum sounds and the overabundance of triplets and rolls, but I guess that's pretty personal. If you don't like rim sounds, Feels could be irritating, I suppose, but it did seem that Noah employed similar fills all over the record. Again, NTB has the most interesting and unique rhythm and sound.

I also think that the production failed to build a world that I wanted to inhabit. I found the instrumentation quite generic, with layers upon layers of squelches and indistinguishable keyboard/guitar. You then had a shit load of redundant Moog bass which made things worse, and all the interesting stuff towards the top end was just swamped. I liked the vocals but again it was hard to make out the more interesting effects and delivery because they were presented as quite thin and reedy to find a place within the mix. Compare that with Danse Manatee where they're equally thin and reedy, but they're in their own space and are therefore very striking.

I think NTB and Applesauce are both stunning, though, and the bridge/middle eight of Today's Supernatural is as good as anything else they've done, it winds ecstatically to deeper heights.

this is a good post even if it's hard to agree with every single point (ntp / tomboy seems like a bit of a stretch)

e: lol i didn't even realize it was stanshant at first because it's so levelheaded

(ntp / tomboy seems like a bit of a stretch)

to be fair:

Pitchfork: Noah, were your songs on this record written with Animal Collective in mind the whole time, or were they stuff that you worked on your own?
NL: One of them was, one wasn't. "New Town Burnout" was something I did toward the end of writing the songs for [Tomboy], so I took that melody and made the song for the band.

http://pitchfork.com/features/interview ... ollective/

As tired as complaining about it is I really don't like the production on Centipede Hz and, yes, the arrangements are a bit too busy for my taste. That being said I had the exact same complaints about some of Panda Bear's solo stuff, and that hasn't stopped me from enjoying it. What's ultimately killed Centipede Hz for me is the songs themselves...I just don't like them very much.

Like a lot of other people here I found re-sequencing helped a bit. Here's what I came up with:

1. Moonjock
2. Honeycomb
3. Rosie Oh
4. Applesauce
5. Pulleys
6. New Town Burnout
7. Monkey Riches
8. Gotham
9. Amanita

The fact that so many fans have felt the need to do this not just to Centipede Hz but to Panda Bear's last two albums is indicative of a certain level of disappointment, I think, and it's why so many are really pulling for them to just nail a release again. I can't imagine doing this to Feels or Strawberry Jam, though I'm sure some people would even change those (Daffy Duck for Tikwid, anyone?).

It will always be a personal taste thing I guess, especially among obsessive fans who have built some kind of ideal image of the band in their heads.

Regardless, I say let bygones be bygones. I don't have to like ALL of their music, especially when they've given me so much that I do enjoy.

jfw7 wrote:

(ntp / tomboy seems like a bit of a stretch)

to be fair:

wrote:

Pitchfork: Noah, were your songs on this record written with Animal Collective in mind the whole time, or were they stuff that you worked on your own?
NL: One of them was, one wasn't. "New Town Burnout" was something I did toward the end of writing the songs for [Tomboy], so I took that melody and made the song for the band.

http://pitchfork.com/features/interview ... ollective/

thanks, makes sense that he didn't just make that up. i couldn't figure out the timeline of when they would have been connected. it would have been a good tomboy track if the structure had been tightened up a bit

Really good write-up, Stanshant. I almost agree with every single point.

The album has its highlights and, as Stanshant implied, those highs are its more jovial moments. Had they kept the tone more consistent (like they probably will with "Painting With...") then CHz would have been much tighter record. I understand that they wanted to make a sort of anti-MPP by attempting this almost cabaret-style songwriting with tracks like TS, FT, or MR but those tracks tended to be either overwrought, uninspired, meandering, or some unpleasant combination of the three. The production didn't help much either; the overall mixing and cluttered composition often seemed as unfocused and confused as the songwriting.

Like, the concept and effort was admirable: it was as if they wanted to give their discography its own Tusk, whereby the songs are distinguishable by their songwriters and where the only collaboration seemed to be in the instrumentals. But the awkward inclusion of a lonely Deakin-penned track and the heavy predominance of Avey Tare made the album sound like a solo project with unneeded interruptions. Panda Bear's tracks were strong, particularly NTB, but his input into CHz' songwriting seemed almost non-sequitur. For a band whose records are lauded for being both lyrically and musically coherent, CHz is unusually beguiling.

I sound more harsh than I really want to because jams like "Honeycomb" and "Moonjock" are among my favorite things the group has ever done. But I can't help but wonder how things may have been better had the CHz-era never happened. Maybe Noah could have taken a break and let the other three members conjure something up something unique, perhaps by borrowing from Deakin's solo material or by expanding on that forgotten Glasslands material (which did not even involve Panda Bear). Maybe the band could have called an indefinite hiatus, allowing most of Avey Tare's tracks to be carried over to his solo ventures (where they may have fit a little more comfortably). Or maybe the album could have been more satisfying if the group had not toured with the same set of songs a year in advance. Regardless, CHz is an unusual case where I simultaneously enjoy an album and yet wish that it never came to be.

I absolutely love Centipede Hz. I hate that it gets such a bad rep. I would argue that it embodies everything AC is about. I moved to Philly right when it was released and it was my first time being on my own away from home. Walking to work through the city listening to New Town Burnout staring at the skyscrapers is a feeling I have yet to experience again. I also rode the subway almost everyday so even though there are supposed to be these major outer space alien vibes, I get way more of an underground vibe, like a centipede crawling through the dirt. And I think the concept of making an album that sounds like your plucking out random radio waves from the universe and stitching them together to make a song is ingenious and they NAILED it. Centipede Hz is such a great name too because the sound is so electric and Noah's percussion legitimately sounds like all of the different legs of a centipede moving in sync. If I had to pick something I don't like about it it's Rosie Oh. I don't hate the song but I was really disappointed by it. It just sounds really lazy and poorly mixed. All those random sounds don't make sense to me, but I know they're there for a reason (it's the theme of the album). I also listened to the live shows a lot leading up to the release and I thought that the production on monkey riches couldn't have been a lot bigger. It feels so small and airtight. Overall all I think it's an incredibly well executed concept.

if im honest, i love everythng abt chz excepppptt.... the panda and deakin songs : / ...used to not understand monkey riches rlly but its grown on me pretty hard over time.

now dont get me wrong, ntb is pretty awesome, and i still rlly dig rosie oh in some ways, but i get this weird feeling from both of them that they were phoned in a bit. i mean there's the interview where they actually say noah didnt dig rosie, and they both kinda feel like repeats or something. like been-there-done-thats, like tantrum barb alllmost sounded like that ut still was awesome.... plus ntb sounded too much like tomboy (the song) when they were first playing it live....

but then like all pbvsgr tracks were amazing so idk.. feels lame to complain tho, rlly dig chz. its their classic rock/hair metal tribal math prog-pop epic

i guess my ideal chz would be subbing in the 3 b sides and dropping non-avey tracks for a full avey album... would be a damn good album tho

Haven't heard anyone defend Father Time yet, so thought I would. Love that song, definitely one of my favorites on the album.

CHz had one of my favorite concepts of all AC albums, though it didn't really translate well into the instrumentation and production choices because it all sounded kinda messy and thrown together. There's so much hectic activity going on but oftentimes (especially on Moonjock) it sounded muffled and the more striking elements were blurred into the background.

Also, as much as I love Deakin's influence on AC, it felt jarring for him to have a whole song to himself on Wide Eyed. It's a great song, but sounds like it's by a different band.

I think the reason it got so much backlash when it came out was because it was the first time where the initial reaction wasn't "THIS IS THE BEST ANIMAL COLLECTIVE ALBUM YET", which is fair because it isn't. But it's still a great album in its own right.

I think applesauce and today's supernatural are by far the best songs on the album. and I think that's because they fit the band's description of the album, esp. w/r/t segmented songwriting and stuff. applesauce and crimson 10" is cool because they are the 2 clear best songs of the era.

think the record has great parts (appropriately) like transition between wide eyed and father time, the sections w/ the choir in ntb and mercury man and the heart of nowhere part of that song, some cool sounding instrumentation and melodies in spots.

unfortunately feel like noah's songs are underdeveloped - which I think is even more apparent given the care evident in all the pbvsgr songs. wide eyed is awful. I get nothing from moonjock and amanita and feel embarrassed listening to both.

think it's a slog to listen through because there are too many weak songs and - with the exceptions of Rosie oh, pulleys, today's supernatural and applesauce - the songs would probably benefit from losing 30 secs to a minute (or losing father time/wide eyed completely).

also agree with stanshant regarding mixing

I dunno how you guys can reorder CHz with all the transitions


Likes
- the transitions. Seriously incredible. esp ntb into monkey riches
- applesauce. the first anco song that wasn't on HCTI that clicked for me
- the deak

dislikes
- it sounded cramped and dry
- too busy

I like Chz a lot more than most people on here (it seems) and it's probably my favorite album by them. I do have a few problems with it though. Father Time, while a great track, only excites me when I listen to it by itself. It's a good breather track but it still feels like it belongs somewhere else. Pulleys is really boring. And Amanita lacks punch. Production wise, things are very busy and sharp but I like that. I'm always discovering new things, and I can zero in on different elements with each listen. There are parts of certain songs where I wish they would tone things down but it never ruins the song for me.

I love it. It shows they have potential for more thrashy types of songs and I want them to follow something like that.

I hated the production but love moon jock, pulleys and amanita. I felt the drums were way way too repetitive as well.

I still do listen to the entire record a lot though.

like: nothing
hate: everything

It's their best album if you ask me (although Painting With will probably take that cake). I hated it at first, but the density of it really unfolds itself after a few listens and there's just so much goodness to discover.

Rosie Oh, Moonjock, Pulleys, and New Town Burnout are my favorites, but there aren't any tracks that I feel are less than decent. Not a big fan of Father Time but I can dig it depending on my mood. New Town Burnout and Rosie Oh are incredibly relate-able to me, and that's probably because their Panda songs.

Centipede Hz really requires some good headphones and patience. If you expect to like every song on the first listen, then you're probably not going to be rewarded with a good experience.

this album has aged well for me. still fun to listen to along with ep tracks, whereas i cant rlly do that for mpp much at all. mpp sometimes seems more "perfect" but i guess im a bit burnt on those songs.. can still listen to daily routine or taste sometimes but ya.. hz 4 life

chz is the most metal ac album and i can tell its def more metal than painting

I like the more straightforward catchy pop/rock style that a lot of the songs incorporate which was uncommon for AC at the time. I like the "alien radio" concept a lot and Avey and Panda's vocals were as great as they always are in the studio. I think the live percussion and guitar adds a lot to the tracks as well. I like Deakin.
I don't like how a lot of the songs felt somewhat rushed though. The bridges in songs like Today's Supernatural and Father Time felt really hastily written and a lot of the songs tend to write themselves in circles. I don't like a lot of the bass sounds or the effects on Avey's vocals. I felt like a lot of the non-musical aspects of their music were more crammed into these tracks as an afterthought rather than playing a consistent role in the making of the songs. A lot of this might be because of their new use of sequencers, but those worked pretty well on Down There and PBVGR imo. Also I hate the album art.
Overall the album is enjoyable but I don't find myself often going back to it.

I don't like how a lot of the songs felt somewhat rushed though. The bridges in songs like Today's Supernatural and Father Time felt really hastily written ...

huh that's crazy I came here to post about how much I love the bridge of today's supernatural. for real. It's one of my favourite AC moments. I'm just gonna go for it.
I love the way the chords move to this whole song, but the bridge just picks everything up a notch. One of my favourite parts from this album is "feels like a SUNS. GOING. DOWN." I remember driving around after picking up the album and the sun was setting and it was just such a good moment. and then pandas backing OH-OH vox over the next section and I love the lyrics "but have you seen the clouds? you should come on out. today feels so supernatural " it's so fucking triumphant or something I dunno.
other favourite parts from the album include:
- the instrumental break in new town burnout, specifically the second half, leading upto "lift this weight"
- "and when I was young I thought fruit was an infinite thiiiing"
- the ending of amanita of course

only song I don't really like is moonjock.

Yeah Panda's vox and drumming during that bridge are insane.