Album Review: Panda Bear - Tomboy

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This review will feature in the April edition of Notion Magazine

For all the wild exaltation heaped on neo-psych savants Animal Collective, it seems the most dedicated of discerning musos have found greater kindred spirit in Panda Bear, the solo side project of AC founder-member Noah Lennox. Scene-screening blogs Tiny Mix Tapes and Gorilla vs. Bear both picked the last Panda Bear record, 2007’s Person Pitch, as their best of the decade. Pitchfork placed it eighth – a full six places above its more illustrious cousin, Merriweather Post Pavilion. Early, and erroneous, whispers of a chillwave godfather spurred the record on, while the woozy adventures across borderless meter and time kept it on heavy rotation from East London to East Village.

However, those expecting Tomboy to ape the gurgling atoll-pop of Person Pitch may well fall off their Fixie bikes. Rather than floating a pedalo off a Pacific shore, this time the good ship Panda Bear has been anchored, with Lennox finding his feet on more concrete musical ground. Lead single ‘Tomboy’, which emerged last July, served early notice of a change of direction. Rolling dub-rhythms provided new rhythmic ballast. Huge riffing slabs of guitar – something Lennox attributes to “thinking about Nirvana and the White Stripes” – replaced the clicks, whirs and keys of yore. And while the multi-tracked tribal vocal attack remained, the spears had been sharpened. This was experimental music with songform, designed for the dancehalls, not the bedroom.

It’s not an exception that proves the rule. Experimental producer par excellence Sonic Boom (formerly of Spacemen 3) shows himself either to be a genius of reinvention or utterly superfluous to the recording process – having helmed the diffusion of MGMT’s clipped electro-pop into one big lysergic meander last year, here his mix performs the opposite trick. Tomboy contains 11 tracks, and ‘songs’ abound – great, soaring, bombastic ones, superabundant with killer hooks.

Only a late run of ambient numbers, starting with the sore-thumb shimmer-sprawl of ‘Scheheradze’, break rank. Juxtaposed with breathless, intelligible pop singles like ‘You Can Count On Me’ and ‘Surfer Hymn’, the wobbly stuff falls flat. Poppiest, and best, is the superb ‘Last Night At The Jetty’ – which twists the disposable afro-prep whimsy of Vampire Weekend into something at once bouncing and brash, yet suffused with glassy-eyed regret. “Didn’t we have a good time?” sigh a thousand Lennox’s in undulating unison. Aren’t we now? 

8/10

Choice Cuts: Last Night At The Jetty; You Can Count On Me

Tomboy is released 11 April on Paw Tracks 

Short Cuts! New Releases 14/12/09

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*** Brief run-down of this week’s new releases, including track recommendations from THE POPSCENER***

Former Ghosts – Fleurs

One could – and some certainly will – attempt to provide a grandiloquent celebration of this collection of ambient, murky, and occasionally noisy electronica. However, reduced to its constituent parts, this is the Postal Service’s whirs, clicks and dance-claps with Ian Curtis vocals and a similarly miserable post-punk outlook. Luckily for Former Ghosts, it mostly works, only becoming tiresome when the female vocalist is allowed to wail along too prominently in the foreground.  Free advice for Former Ghosts: don’t let her next time.

Choice Cuts: ‘Mother’, ‘Hold On’

7/10

Alicia Keys – The Element of Freedom

Where Keys’ last offering, As I Am, tentatively opened doors between her piano based balladry and a genuine pop career, this one goes one further: it moves beyond the average domain of R’n’B infused pop to create something smart and inventive. The growling synths that lurk in the background of songs like the splendid ‘Wait Till You See My Smile’ rather suit Keys slightly breathy vocals, the limitations of which mercifully prevent the seemingly de rigueur tonsil hysterics of her contemporaries. Bravo! Next task: fix the rhyming-dictionary lyrical nadirs (“Night/Right/Right/Fight/Night” from ‘This Bed’ – ouch).

Choice Cuts: ‘Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart’, ‘Wait Till You See My Smile’

7.5/10

Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind

Although armed with the same schizophrenic rhythms and scatterbrained sounds, Fall Be Kind sounds ever so slightly warmer to me than this year’s full lengther. Unfortunately, for all the kudos, I still really couldn’t care less for the band’s laboriously cluttered prog take on indie-electronica. Thanks to the hype I specifically gave this one extra spins, but it turns out I was right all along: this IS overrated pap with occasional flashes of worth – principally ‘On a Highway’, which sounds just enough like Sonic Youth for the iPod generation to appease me into giving it a bonus point.

Choice Cuts: ‘On a Highway’, ‘Graze’

6/10