Person Pitch [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.

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.

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. It featured on the end of year lists of many music magazines and blogs and having resisted it for over a year I am suddenly unsure why I was stubborn about it. I have been an admirer, though not precisely a fan, of Animal Collective for some years now, but more importantly I am a fan of the kind of cut and paste, DIY aesthetic that characterises this album. So, on paper this should have been a shoo-in for me.

If you don't know already, Panda Bear - also known as Noah Lennox - creates impressionistic collages from found sound, layered (home-made) beach boy harmonies and samples. Like his parent band and affiliate Ariel Pink, his music is imbued with a kind of heavily abstracted childhood nostalgia, almost an acid flashback to some indefinite sun-drenched 60s heyday when the kids were free and the pot was cheap. Again, as with Animal Collective, there is something volatile, almost nauseating about Panda Bear's kaleidoscopic, sonic sugar-rush of candy-coloured textures. Despite the warped cassette-mimicked distortion and tendency to rather overpile the ingredients, there is a kind of Beach Boys-in-a-blender orthodoxy to his music. There is a very particular vision, and Panda Bear explores this landscape tirelessly, even repetitively. The singing - lyrics mostly indecipherable - is used more as an instrument than a vocal. Heavy on reverb, they always sound detached, abstract, never entirely lucid.

The joyous opener 'Comfy In Nautica' begins with what sounds like what I'd like to believe is the tracks of a big dipper - one of the those rickerty old Coney Island ones. A woozy head-rush of loops and harmonies, it recalls Caribou's similar, more polished album of the same year 'Andorra', but with a textural roughness that somehow places it closer to the 60s psychedelia that evidently influences both artists. The loop of a scateboard clattering over paving stones forms the basis for 'Take Pills', a drift of hazy psych pop with a little splice of stoner guitar: the sort sampled by Cypress Hill on tracks like 'Hits from the Bong'. 'Bros', the album's centrepiece, is 12 minutes plus of slowly morphing cut and paste. A bubbling cauldron of sonic ephemera it builds into a heady, almost maddening carousel of blissful noise. 'I'm Not' provides a welcome change of mood with four minutes of stain-glass ambience and a choral, even spiritual quality more Brian Eno than Brian Wilson.

Thereafter, 'Person Pitch' doesn't quite hit the same heights. 'Good Girl' and 'Carrots' merge together to form another lengthy opus, but there are too many ideas being too loosely held together. 'Search for Delicious' is another ethereal ambient piece with a cavernous, Cathedral-esque resonance but is not quite as striking as 'I'm Not'. The closer 'Ponytail' is just a brief reprise of the detached, Beach Boys harmonies that informed most of 'Person Pitch' - a strange sickly brew indeed. If you like this, try aforementioned artists and albums, or The Ruby Suns 'Sea Lion'.