Animal Collective and their front man Panda Bear (AKA Noah Lennox) have made a career from taking electronic and psychedelic noises and turning them into fantastic pop songs that explore sonic landscapes with exhilarating results. Animal Collective have undoubtedly been one of the most influential and seminal acts of the 21st century, hitting their peak with 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, which was easily their most accessible album and an artistic peak. The album truly freed up their opportunities as a band in terms of what they were able to do with their sound and stands as a landmark in underground music. Since then the band have released one more album and a series of solo projects.
Panda Bear has been pushing the limits of the sounds that everyone thought Animal Collective had perfected further and further. He’s also been getting his name out to the public with notable collaborations such as appearing on Daft Punk‘s Random Access Memories. His new album Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper sees Noah Lennox pushing himself further away from Animal Collective, allowing his solo career as of late to become this little pocket in which he can throw all of his urges for his little experimentations in. On this album he takes some of the more difficult sounds heard on Animal Collective records like Centipede Hz which is a widely forgotten album in their discography, and mixes it with some of the not so great features from his last solo album Tomboy.
Considering it sounds like a mix between Tomboy and Centipede Hz it’s no surprise that you get every feature that you would typically expect from a Panda Bear album; washed down organic sounds, some vocal harmonies given in typical Panda Bear fashion and some cracking melodies. The problem is that it ends up sounding like a lesser version of earlier projects. When Panda Bear manages to find a good groove on this record he keeps going with it for way longer than is needed, and it’s not like previous projects where he will use subtle changes to keep it interesting and to progress the song – he uses subtle changes that are unnoticeable instead. ‘Come To Your Senses‘ is a good example of this; the track goes on for 7 minutes using the same instrumental over and over until it’s almost unbearable as it literally does nothing for the song other than drag it down.
Elsewhere the instrumentals on other tracks are astonishingly bland for music produced by such a revered artist, almost as if his urges to experiment are purely to see how long he can chuck a good melody on a track before it becomes overdone. ‘Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker‘ has an instrumental so thin and airy that it’s ends up feeling completely unneeded. This song and many others also have these effects thrown on that seem to serve no purpose other than to make it deliberately sound similar to the psychedelic brilliance we’re used to from an Animal Collective record. This is used on all of the tracks and is even detrimental to the better instrumentals on here like ‘Lonely Wanderer‘ which features a beautiful piano piece with Panda Bear lightly singing over the top, that’s unfortunately drowned out by whizzing synths. Credit is due in places; the arpeggios on the track ‘Tropic Of Cancer‘ are fantastic and the buzzing synth leads on ‘The Selfish Gene‘ sound like something Depeche Mode could have done.
As for Lennox himself on this record, he’s coming out with some brilliant vocal melodies as he always does and they do manage to stick from time to time because that’s just what he’s brilliant at. ‘Boys Latin‘ has him going up and down scales with his voice in a completely engrossing and spellbinding way. ‘Mr Noah‘ has him singing one of the strangest and most ambitious hooks on the entire album, and it’s one of the times where the repetition truly works out. But still, the mixing on this record a lot of the time means that the vocals have no place against the instrumentation and often feel lost, just drifting around in nothingness. Not only do they float around in the background but the vocals often have way too much reverb on them to the point where you have no idea what he’s saying especially at the times where they sound so uninspired. Lennox does actually tap into some great themes of death on here dating back to when he was younger and he experienced the death of his Father with lyrics like ‘And you won’t come back/ You can’t come back‘ that are simple, yet heartfelt and highlight the finality of death. These moments are ruined by the way in which the record has been produced.
Panda Bear has managed to create an album that sounds so much like his previous material yet somehow manages to not come close to it in quality. This is an album filled with fragments of genius in songs and the so so many moments of confusion and tedium. For every moment that sounds incredibly inspired there are three that sound unbelievably dull or empty.
