Animal Collective: Centipede HZ – review

There are really two Animal Collective stories. There's the band's hopscotch artistic development – a self-confessed desire to never make the same record twice – which has led them through 15 years of campfire meditations, clattering psychedelia, cacophonic noise-pop and a host of other spliced genres. In parallel to this is a more linear growth in cult and cultural status, with each new release winning more converts. The upshot is that Animal Collective – from their start as childhood friends making weirdo music together each summer – have become a major band by stealth.

Centipede Hz is their ninth studio album, and a bigger deal than usual thanks to the success of their eighth, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, where the two arcs of Animal Collective's career intersected beautifully. Just as their fanbase got big enough to push a release to overground success, the group hit on their most accessible sound: full-throated, open-hearted, redemptive psych-pop, heavily tweaked with electronic rhythms and samples. They were rewarded with torrents of acclaim, dozens of imitators, and a subtly changed narrative. Merriweather, hailed immediately as a modern classic, was suddenly the peak of their developed sound, not just another experiment.

At which point many bands might have felt tempted to produce similar goods next time. But Animal Collective, admirably, have jumped in the other direction. Centipede Hz is recognisably by the same songwriters as Merriweather, but the band have veered sharply away from that record's more blissed-out, delicate and celebratory moments. From the scrunch of radio noise and hollowed out drumming that opens Moonjock, this is a harsher, busier, more hectic and blustering album.

In interviews, Animal Collective have talked a lot about "sweat": the loops and samples that made Merriweather Post Pavilion so intoxicating also reduced the group to their own spectators live, so the return of guitarist Deakin on Centipede Hz has been seized as an opportunity to record as a unit with an eye on the stage. It explains some of the record's bluntness – every track is full of incident, and most incidents are mixed to a similar level, so at first the songs hit you as unresolved slabs of babble. This makes Centipede Hz a tough listening experience to begin with, but not a particularly weird one. Once you adjust to the new method and peer through the layers of detail and clustered production, these are often quite conventional – if meandering – indie-rock songs.

Are they good ones, though? Animal Collective fans don't just love the band for their constant experimentation, but for the sense of soul-baring wonder they have brought to their best-loved tracks. It's this apparent purity of emotion that explains, more than any sonic cues, the regular comparisons to the Beach Boys. Partly it's an effect of their peculiar kind of non-singing – Avey Tare, who has the bulk of lead vocals on Centipede Hz, specialises in an ecstatic yelping and bellowing. When it meets weaker material – the sing-song refrains of Monkey Riches for instance – it's one of the most irritating noises in music. But when it syncs with the song it can feel as if it's transmitting unvarnished personal truths.

Centipede Hz promises more of this – there's even a track called Wide Eyed – but like everything else on the album, emotion has to fight through the aggressive sound. On the lead single Today's Supernatural – a swirl of organ and Latin-inflected rhythms – Tare rides the overload with cries of "C'mon let let let let let let go!" and it's the album's most thrilling moment. Elsewhere, it works best when the pace or intensity drops slightly – Applesauce's bug-eyed prettiness; the woozy, percussive Pulleys; or the skittering rhythms and bending synths of the more downbeat New Town Burnout. But there are also tracks where the thick soundfield covers up less memorable songs: Wide Eyed rides an elephantine rhythm in unrewarding circles, and the fussy Mercury Man marries crowded production with a grating Tare vocal: "Two human beings! I'm upset, you're upset!" he caws, accurately.

Centipede Hz ends on a high with the grand Amanita, which sees the band rushing gleefully back into the forest for fresh inspiration: "I'm gonna come back and things will be different/ I'm gonna bring back some stories again." It's a promise of more delights to come, and a triumphant end to a tricky record. The crossover path between experimental voyagers and indie-rock darlings is well trodden, and from Spiritualized to Mercury Rev it's studded with groups opting to refine their sound, not quest for a new one. It's to Animal Collective's credit that they haven't taken this option. Centipede Hz sets them up well for the future, without always managing to satisfy in the present.