Panda Bear
Person Pitch

Paw Tracks 2007

By Kyle Munzenrieder

Person Pitch opens with an army of Beach Boys emerging from a solid metallic jangle, marching on slowly but surely to a steady beat as noisy anomalies bullet by on all sides. Like most warfare these days, this music was created by a single man in a room stacked with electronics, that man being Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear, the drummer from Animal Collective.

After recording his debut solo album Young Prayer in the same room his father died in – would you say that’s cathartic or morbid? – Lennox got married, moved to Lisbon, became a dad and listened to a lot of Kylie Minogue. As you might gather, this makes for a cheerier affair. It sounds like Brian Wilson produced by Brian Eno (in ambient mode), and then dubbed out and pushed through a sonic haze full of reverbed repetition, strange percussion, and animal, err, pet sounds...

God, ok it's seriously impossible to listen to this album without recalling the Beach Boys. The vocal arrangement is clearly derivative of that band at the top of their game, but there's so much more at play here it's a shame that one particular influence looms this heavily, especially during the early tracks.

Though he's faced his own bouts with drugs and the darkness Lennox isn't tormented by the perfection of verse-chorus-verse pop smashes that has plagued and knighted WIlson, but that's nearly beside the point. He is masterful behind the boards. If you listen to the music itself and put references at bay, or single out the primarily vocal-less tracks like "Search For Delicious," the Wilson comparisons evaporate. Panda Bear pushes his compositions past traditional song structure to solder soundscapes, melting sounds together and smoothing down complex arrangements and juxtapositions. So really who can blame our dear ol' Panda Bear for building such a beautiful, yet challenging record around a tried-and-true vocal style, one as familiar as summer?

This discourse of Panda Bear's Person Pitch is written by Kyle Munzenrieder for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007 .