PANDA BEAR

PANDA BEAR
PERSON PITCH (2007)
320 KBPS

As a member of the acclaimed Animal Collective, Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) has for years been making music that mixes experimental structures with a pure '60s pop sensibility. On his second solo album of looped and layered experimental post-pop, he shows considerable skill in crafting songs that retain the essence of psychedelia while having been crafted with loop-based home recording methods. The album's finest moment has to be "Bros," a slowly percolating and unapologetically lovely twelve-and-a-half-minute song. Like Brian Wilson lost in a K-hole, gorgeous harmonies soaked in echo bump up against each other until they reach a rhythmic, fascinating crescendo. Elsewhere, Panda Bear's music tends toward the same effect a tad too much, often without the same transcendent quality. Person Pitch has fabulous moments aplenty, though (as with Captain Beefheart's 1968 Strictly Personal) one does wish that fewer reverb-soaked vocals were used, or that they were used even further, pushed into complete abstract dissociation.

1. Comfy in Nautica
2. Take Pills
3. Bros
4. I'm Not
5. Good Girl
6. Carrots
7. Search for Delicious
8. Ponytail