PANDA BEAR
“Tomboy” (Paw Tracks)
Panda Bear, the echo-haunted singer-songwriter otherwise known as Noah Lennox, spends most of his new album considering a state of grace. This isn’t out of character for him, either as a solo artist or as a member of Animal Collective, one of indie-rock’s most insistently ecstatic bands. But “Tomboy” finds him in sustained reflection, singing sublimely about the managing of expectations. It’s a deeply interior album, but with an acute awareness of the space it inhabits, and the impression it hopes to leave.
The dimensions of the songs are unusually clear, by Panda Bear standards. They hew to a stylistic whole, imploring and bittersweet, with suggestions of ecclesiastical harmony. Multitracked vocals drift in parallel over a warm electronic wash, delivering lyrics that tend toward self-searching aphorism. These are secular hymns for the indie kids — one exhortatory song is actually called “Surfer’s Hymn,” as if to pre-empt comparison with Brian Wilson, Panda Bear’s most obvious touchstone — but that shouldn’t limit their appeal.
They sound great, for one thing: concise and focused, with most of the digressive sonic elements folded into the fabric of the songs. Like “Person Pitch” (Paw Tracks), Panda Bear’s breakthrough 2007 album, “Tomboy” was made in solitary fashion in his adopted home, Lisbon. But he used electronics and samplers to construct “Person Pitch,” and he originated much of “Tomboy” on guitar. The change registers under the surface: you almost never hear guitar as a recognizable timbre here, but the directness of the songwriting feels indebted to it, even on a track as hazily layered as the opener, “You Can Count on Me.” (The album was mixed by the producer known as Sonic Boom.)
Subtle tensions run through the songs, lyrically as well as musically. “Slow Motion,” which spools out over a trip-hop beat, urges calm in the face of skepticism; “Afterburner,” which rides a harder cadence, urges skepticism in the face of hype. (“I don’t buy it,” goes the chorus.) “Alsatian Darn” features the passing couplet “What to do when the things that I want don’t allow/For the handful of mouths that I’m trying to feed?” And in “Last Night at the Jetty” Panda Bear flips into his most Wilsonesque falsetto for the pivotal line “I don’t want to describe something that I’m not.”
Finally, on an album so steeped in an air of humility, there comes something like an admission. “Some might say that to win’s not all that it’s about,” Panda Bear sings in “Benfica,” his own one-man cathedral choir. Soon comes the rejoinder: “But there is not a thing more true or natural than wanting to win.” And as the track floats toward a fade: “There’s not a thing more to life/Not a thing more to life/Not a thing more to life.” NATE CHINEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/a...mon-and-panda-bear-review.html?_r=1&ref=music
