Jubilee Offer: Patriotic Classics for £2.50 |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Track Listings
| 1. Comfy in Nautica |
| 2. Take Pills |
| 3. Bros |
| 4. I'm Not |
| 5. Good Girl |
| 6. Carrots |
| 7. Search for Delicious |
| 8. Ponytail |
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
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. --Mike McGonigal
Review
The Animal Collective - four friends who like to get together to play music and watch movies and play football - have a sprawl of side projects and off-shoots which seem to expand daily, and attracts like-minded types such as Vashti Bunyan. Panda Bear is chiefly the work of Noah Lennox and chum Scott Mou; however Noah is the significant force here, with Person Pitch - his third album - showing the developments of growing up, becoming both a husband and father as well as de-camping to Lisbon, Portugal.
Almost a song cycle, albeit one that encompasses folk, Kylie, Cat Stevens, dub reggae and ice cream vans, Person Pitch reverberates around your head like channelling an ecclesiastical ecstasy while dressed as a woolly, free wanderer in a tribal head-dress serenading the great gods with their saints and symbols while ejaculating colossal harmonic hallucinations.
Sounds a bit hippy? Oh yes, but like the most rapturous moments of Spiritualized, Mercury Rev or Flaming Lips, there's a dream-like quality that sends you weightless with joy. It's what you thought the Polyphonic Spree would actually sound like. A daydream trapped in an amorphous bubble of crystal aspic. Believe me - tracks such as wide-eyed opener ''Comfy In Nautica'', ''Take Pills'' and the 12 minute-odd odyssey that is ''Good Girl/Carrots'' are just too good to be ignored.
Person Pitch sounds like the Beach Boys hosting a Hare Krishna-themed underwater music workshop. With whooshing noises, ecstatic screaming, tribal drumming, celestial chimes and eastern elements all enveloping towards a free and beautiful noise. In outer space.
Person Pitch is an album that could soundtrack all the amazing moments in one's life, imbued with the glory of being alive; of birth and death and celebration, this is the sound you could live on and with forever. Like running naked through soup or swimming in flowers, the cool side of the pillow or cooing at the sweet wonder of baby animals. It's an album that renews your faith in music and allows the inner child to run a glorious riot. And the cover's gorgeous too.
Dreamers - you may have just found your album of the year. Astounding. --Ian Wade
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This album is really beautiful. Sounds like Pet Sounds/Smile but not in a corny, derivative way. It has a similar warm spiritual sound, only with loads of weird samples and loops. Great to listen to out walking on a sunny day, and the cover art is excellent too.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
While I adore Panda Bear's work in the Animal Collective, I just never warmed up to "Young Prayer." It was too simple, too meandering.
Fortunately the same is not true of the follow-up, "Person Pitch," which adds some extra sonic dimension to Panda Bear's strange melodies. Where once his music was spare and almost painfully lo-fi, now it's a shimmering, bizarre, otherworldly extravaganza, like a hazy-eyed circus.
It opens with a rattling, fluttering noise, like a kitchen appliance right before it dies. It gets joined in by the sound of marching, a lion roaring, and voices raised in wordless song. It sounds like a happy, cheerful revolution.
Over those sounds, Panda Bear sings rather distantly, "Try to tell me how to do it/only because I'm new to here/coolness is having courage/courage to do what's right/I'll try to remember always/just to have a good time/good time good time good time..."
The songs that follow are much the same -- stately tambourine pop, an acoustic indiepop number that sounds like it was played underwater, swirling cacophonies, shimmering vocal pop, tribal beats, ethereal ambient stuff, and finally the soft, unsure, shimmering "Ponytail" with its distant vocals.
And he sprinkles it with plenty of other stuff -- sirens, bubbling water, descending planes, owls hooting, and basically whatever odd, appropriate sounds work in these songs. Perhaps the main problem is that it's full of double songs that would have worked better if they had been cut into separate tracks.
But it shows that Panda Bear is adept at swirling, bizarrely otherworldly music. The music here is more ethereal and less earthy than his Animal Collective work -- rather than a crazy acid trip or a tribal party (although we do get some wild tribal beats), this music sounds like a gentle dream of peace and shimmering skies.
Instead of the acoustic stuff of "Young Prayer," we have wild painting of samplers, keyboard, shimmering synth, bittersweet ambience, and occasionally a bit of sprightly guitar pop. Sometimes it sounds like a mess, yet somehow it swirls together into an exquisite pop tapestry.
And it has some lovely lyrics too: "When my soul starts glowing/when my soul starts growing/I am as I want to be/and I know I never will stop growing." Panda Bear's voice is a sweet, subdued one, which he uses as an instrument as often as he actually sings -- he becomes a part of the warm, dreamlike sound.
Beautiful and airy, "Person Pitch" is a complete 180 from his previous solo work. But that is only for the best -- an exquisite little sonic gem.
Fortunately the same is not true of the follow-up, "Person Pitch," which adds some extra sonic dimension to Panda Bear's strange melodies. Where once his music was spare and almost painfully lo-fi, now it's a shimmering, bizarre, otherworldly extravaganza, like a hazy-eyed circus.
It opens with a rattling, fluttering noise, like a kitchen appliance right before it dies. It gets joined in by the sound of marching, a lion roaring, and voices raised in wordless song. It sounds like a happy, cheerful revolution.
Over those sounds, Panda Bear sings rather distantly, "Try to tell me how to do it/only because I'm new to here/coolness is having courage/courage to do what's right/I'll try to remember always/just to have a good time/good time good time good time..."
The songs that follow are much the same -- stately tambourine pop, an acoustic indiepop number that sounds like it was played underwater, swirling cacophonies, shimmering vocal pop, tribal beats, ethereal ambient stuff, and finally the soft, unsure, shimmering "Ponytail" with its distant vocals.
And he sprinkles it with plenty of other stuff -- sirens, bubbling water, descending planes, owls hooting, and basically whatever odd, appropriate sounds work in these songs. Perhaps the main problem is that it's full of double songs that would have worked better if they had been cut into separate tracks.
But it shows that Panda Bear is adept at swirling, bizarrely otherworldly music. The music here is more ethereal and less earthy than his Animal Collective work -- rather than a crazy acid trip or a tribal party (although we do get some wild tribal beats), this music sounds like a gentle dream of peace and shimmering skies.
Instead of the acoustic stuff of "Young Prayer," we have wild painting of samplers, keyboard, shimmering synth, bittersweet ambience, and occasionally a bit of sprightly guitar pop. Sometimes it sounds like a mess, yet somehow it swirls together into an exquisite pop tapestry.
And it has some lovely lyrics too: "When my soul starts glowing/when my soul starts growing/I am as I want to be/and I know I never will stop growing." Panda Bear's voice is a sweet, subdued one, which he uses as an instrument as often as he actually sings -- he becomes a part of the warm, dreamlike sound.
Beautiful and airy, "Person Pitch" is a complete 180 from his previous solo work. But that is only for the best -- an exquisite little sonic gem.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This is a quite fantastic album - looking at the other reviews perhaps this isn't for everyone, but quite simply I believe this is one of the best albums of 2007. Give it a go - if its for you then it will stay with you for a long time. A beautiful and vivid summer album...
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Neo-psychedelic whimsy
As part of New York's 'Animal Collective', Panda Bear's origins centred around the presentation of an interesting programme of electronic folk music that intersected Nick Drake,... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Daniel Margrain
Awesome!!!
I used to listen to this on myspace. Now I am the happy owner of this CD. Just brilliant music.
Published on 21 April 2010 by Coralie Bouguerra
A Troop of chanting devout evangelical monks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Wow, what a description. My congratulations to J.Kershaw. It's amazing that someone who is talking of their dislike for the record has somehow managed to stumble across the best... Read more
Published on 3 Mar 2009 by Mr. H Chinaski
Beach Boys in a blender! (8/10)
I'm probably the last blogger alive to post a review of Panda Bear's 2007 indie favourite 'Person Pitch' so I'll try to keep this relatively brief. Read more
Published on 22 Aug 2008 by Demob Happy
A nice cheerful early morning sound.....
I was introduced to this music by it's inclusion as a soundtrack on a spoof trailer on YouTube for Francis Ford Coppola's up and (long time) coming film of Kerouac's On The Road. Read more
Published on 19 April 2008 by Kerouac fan
Not really getting it
Has some moments, but after trying a lot to see if there's more beneath the surface I'm not sure there is. Read more
Published on 6 Feb 2008 by Mr Boxplayer
Self Defeating
This is half/good half bad. Many tracks appear to be composed of two tracks, one half is a random mish mash of nonsense, back wards tracks and noise the other half being the song... Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2008 by N. Beattie
Very Sick.
This album is sick. Refined and better than the output from The Animal Collective. Brilliant. Worth buying for Bros alone.
Sick, phat boy.
Sick, phat boy.
Published on 10 Jan 2008 by S. Palmer
Life's Too Short For This.
Lauded by the so-called "critics" in the end of year polls etc. In reality it's awful. It's what Brian Wilson might have sounded like if he had no talent - and could only muster up... Read more
Published on 1 Jan 2008 by Mr. A. L. Fielding
Dancing about architecture
Ok so I'm not likely to listen to EVERYTHING released in 2007. And let's face it I'm only going to listen to albums I think i've got a good chance of liking, so that cuts out loads... Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2007 by Marley's Ghost
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
