I'm down to the last three tracks. So far, I'm mostly in agreement with the "meh" opinion, save for two tracks that have popped out at me. 'Moonjock' and 'Monkey Riches' have both had an appeal to my own sensibilities. I like that 'Moonjock' uses 7/8 meter, because it creates a real rhythmic pull for me. In my general experiences with them, I think Animal Collective does good with odd meters, because I think they have a good sense of how to make the uneven, asymmetrical base rhythms feel very natural. In the case of 'Monkey Riches', the backing line that runs through the whole song is something I think is really addictive. Half of the reason I kept my ear to that song in particular was because of that line and seeing how they worked it behind the material they put in the foreground.
Now that I'm on 'Pulleys', I feel like I can say that the second half of the album has caught on with me a lot stronger than the first half in general. The sound seems a little more cohesive and less manic, with less of a focus on trying to claustrophobically jam as much noise as possible into a song (which is one of AnCo's signature styles, granted). I think that perhaps someone looking for that dense sound from AnCo's earlier discography will find the second half of Centipede Hz boring and listless by comparison to the first half, but that's from the perspective of someone who's still not sold on the denser stuff, so that guess might be totally off-base.
Admittedly, I don't feel like I could solidly rate this album by virtue of the fact that my attention was a little more divided, and I got interrupted from listening a handful of times during the first half that I was, coincidentally or not, more unaffected by. I definitely think there's a lot more to Centipede Hz that I haven't heard yet. My current impression, I think, has me somewhere indeterminately between a 3 and a 4.
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