Song of the day: Animal Collective - Moonjock

There are certain sounds that we all can attest give us goose bumps and essentially make us feel a sense of excitement that cannot be matched by anything else. I think for me personally, the most exciting tracks fall between “Lost Outside the Tunnel” by Aztec Camera to "Carlotta Valdez" by Harvey Danger to “Southern Point” by Grizzly Bear (these are completely impulsive choices and I’m sure an academic sensed introspection would last pages). Regardless of your choices, the tracks essentially encapsulate a sense to physically run and jump around; i.e. get hyped motherfucker.

Now I usually never find a track that gets me this excited nowadays, if anything I’ll find this joy in music that was released a few or many years back, it’s a plague of discovering next to zero excitement in recent releases, and that’s not counting ‘genuine’ excitement; that kind that doesn’t wear off after the initial misleading hype. So color me surprised as hell when I find myself returning to Centipede Hz, probably the most hyped and anticipated release of this goddamn year.

And while I do love a great majority of the tracks on the album (dat fucking first half holy shit) the track that prepares me for everything is opening track “Moonjock”. Starting up with some creepy vocal loops that eventually lead to a repeated “One… One… One…” and explode into the hard hitting snare and hi-hat, it’s just fucking exciting. This continues into a glorious build-up of delayed guitar, distorted organ and bass, and sound effects until Avey Tare begins to sing a deliciously catchy melody and leads to this schizophrenic stuttering that blends into the chaotic soundscape.

Emphasis on the chaotic by the way, the song and majority of the first half of the album doesn’t relent on the sheer amount of sound effects and textures that just fly around like flocks of deranged birds. And while many could call the messy and layered sound of “Moonjock” and Centipede Hz as directionless or just plain ill-composed, when the final chorus of “We ran it out, ran it out” begins repeating in all it’s chaotic glory at the end of “Moonjock”, you realize none of that even matters and you proceed to get lost in the midst of the happy noise. Excitement like that just can’t be faked.