Animal Collective

If one listens to music purely for the sounds and music it produces, Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz is a grand album, but with titles like “Monkey Riches,” “Applesauce,” and “Moonjock” one would think the music would also be lyrically stimulating. But the lyrics are as bland as applesauce.

Drugs should accompany this psychedelic slew of symphonies for complete enjoyment and better understanding, but sober it seems random; the listener can only take pleasure in its sounds if they like the wonderfully strange.

A wallop of weird welcomes the ears as it escorts the listener to track two, “Today’s Supernatural,” which formulates more like a song than a puke bucket of sounds. Avey Tare’s vocals sound like he swallowed the microphone and was unsuccessful at coughing it up for 4:18.

“Father Time” takes a page out of Jane’s Addiction’s book with its signature indelible trippiness and long echoing vocals along with a hula dance rhythm of instrumentation. The vocals perpetually stay high in the sky, devoid of anything to keep the listener’s feet on the ground.

It seems like every sound on Centipede Hz was altered digitally, and blends highly experimental with many moments of samples of strange sounds like whale sounds in the intro of “Pulleys.”

Most songs are around or over five minutes. Adding up to a total of 53:33, a bargain if paying by the minute, but falls short of feeding the ears like eating 30 Otter Pops for dinner. Animal Collective’s experimentation of sound on Centipede Hz exceeds expectations, but lands terribly short on all 300 legs with very lean lyrics.