Panda Bear:Tomboy

9.1/10 dropps
Paw Tracks; 2011

Animal Collective and the individual musicians representing the group have been making strange and alluring music for over ten years now – music that has grown easier and easier to digest(usually), while simultaneously branding their eclectic sound. As a result, and as is typical for something so new and exciting, imitators and inspired musicians have sprung from seemingly nowhere to brandish their efforts, usually in painful and all-too-plain, generic ways. Even so, these efforts have showcased the powerful presence of Animal Collective and the ability for new ideas, as eccentric as they may be, to translate into something greater. Granted, the band lived in obscurity for multiple albums, but eventually the beastly children wet their lips.

Just last year one of the founding members of Animal Collective, Dave Portner (a.k.a. Avey Tare), released his first real solo album, Down There. The album’s familiar atmosphere and haunted electronics were a perfect environment for Portner to tread, as his presence in Animal Collective always leans towards the more abstract. And while Portner and his album created a specific feeling and location, Panda Bear’s (Noah Lennox) long-awaited follow-up to the well-crafted Person Pitch has truly helped to stake his claim as the members’ most  pop-sensible and hook-friendly artist with his fourth album, the simply named Tomboy.

Tomboy is Down There’s closet parallel – a bright, sunny album less concerned with murky longings and instead full of bright light, still very self reflective and at times uneasy, but shows Lennox’s willingness to decipher those odd feelings in the open alongside lapping waves and blue skies. Quite a few of the songs from Tomboy have been released in one form or another for months now and the pieces have only increased my excitement with their catchy delivery and warped sensibilities.

Album opener “You Can Count On Me” sets the tone well, featuring an uplifting rhythm section paired with insecure lyrics that lend the track an underlying and beautiful pop structure. Sampled bird flutters and garbled washes of audience exuberance splash and caress the subtle fragility of the piece. Tomboy seems to share as much in common with Panda Bear’s Young Prayer release as Person Pitch, where a cathedral-like presence conveys a form of spiritual understanding while retaining the psychedelic, rhythmic repetition of his previous effort. While it’s easy to make comparisons to Panda Bear’s influences (The Beach Boys, among others) it’s impossible to truly pinpoint the poignancy of his very distinct delivery. Album standout “Alsatian Darn” only highlights this, where the slow rumble and choir-like beginning slowly crumbles and climbs into a perfect pop creature, its distorted and uneven electronics fist-pounding the altar near the end in remarkable fashion.

With Tomboy, Panda Bear has created a beautiful pairing between his instinctual conjuring of melody and more experimental, reverb-laced distortions that trace his role in Animal Collective. Something special rolls like sweat off these songs. The humidity kills flocks of birds, igniting skin as if doused in boiling streams kissed too intimately by the sun. Yet the album also invokes a sky of a blue rarely seen, with feelings of purity and innocence emanating from this record starker still.

-Andrew Milstead