Tomboy

Panda Bear outdoes himself

Animal Collective’s drummer Noah Lennox, known as Panda Bear to the whole world, has not pleased his fans with new electronic compositions for quite a long time. 2007 saw the release of his breakthrough work Person Pitch, on which he departed from his team’s musical-stylistic model for the first time and made something completely unexpectedly simple and impressive at the same time. Noah took different styles, combined them with his favorite effects and breathed some of his own positive mood and romance into that cocktail. The audience understood after the album Person Pitch that it had not been in vain for the musician to search for his own sounding for almost ten years by then – his eponymous debut album was released back in 1998. It is not hard to guess that he has had enough time to explore the maximum of ways to use samples, various electronic effects, beats and his own vocals. Yet if you believed that the successful record Person Pitch could be only explained by the artist’s good luck and that Panda Bear would hardly ever be able to outdo himself, it is his excellent fourth album Tomboy that proves just the opposite. Mesmerizing but not monotonous, electronic but not false, stylish but not full of pathos, Tomboy will surely occupy a worthy position among the year’s best releases and will become a great addition to any music collection.

Guitar, vocals and of course samples on Tomboy

As a songwriter, Panda Bear is nothing of the ordinary – he cannot stand when it takes too much time to write a composition, two hours is his limit, and he actually considers those pieces that he has spend the least time to write as his best. He has been working on his fourth album Tomboy for the last couple of years, as always starting with singles whose success was providing him with the essential inspirational charge. Unlike the previous album guitars and vocals are accentuated in the first place, though the musician has not entirely refused to use samples. The first of them was the title track released last July – it was a danceable composition making the listeners fall into a trance with the help of quite a long repeating vocal sample. It was later followed by the slow, penetrating, choir-based You Can Count On Me, light vibrating Last Night At The Jetty, and the last one was the ethereal and sparkling Surfer's Hymn, wonderful with the sea noise and marimba sounds. One of the brightest examples of Panda’s masterful knowledge of drums is the complicated song Slow Motion, whereas Scheherazade is the most meditative, peaceful and relaxed number on the album. It is followed by two compositions, which are the longest on the record, Friendship Bracelet (lasting almost six minutes) and Afterburner (almost seven); definitely both of them deserve your attention. The first one is tranquil, filled with unearthly sounds of guitar, vocals, a light beat and fantastic electronic effects, the second is more eclectic, built around ethnic drums and vocals which make one think of Africa, it becomes a bit heavy by the middle with more layers of samples and drums. The album closes with a dreamily psychedelic track Benfica, reminding of some alien’s anthem and even refined with a loud crowd’s cheering at a stadium.

A perfect balance

‘Look, what a beautiful world we live in, it is full of mystery and hides so many secrets’, it is the approximate delightedly positive message running throughout Panda Bear’s new album Tomboy. There is place for silent observation on it as well as for joyful dancing, for an almost religious ecstasy and canticle. At the same time, all these feelings are expressed in such an extremely simple way that everyone is sure to find something close to one on the album. Panda’s third and fourth works are different from each other in the percentage of samples and real instruments – the melodies on the new album are rendered by electro guitar or voices to a greater extent, samples either serving as their background or are practically absent. Light, unobtrusive, almost imponderable and yet attractively enveloping, Tomboy will help you to relax after a hard working day, some tracks will become a perfect background noise for some monotonous work, whereas others, on the contrary, will help you find the solution to a difficult problem. On the whole, Panda Bear has once again found a perfect balance between electronica, vocals and live instruments, has felt the right measure of repeating elements and recorded the album Tomboy, which is raising the standard even higher and putting him on a new level.