City Newspaper Archives - 4/2007
Panda Bear "Person Pitch"
Paw Tracks
Published by Joel Chaffee on Apr 10, 2007
Panda Bear (basically Animal Collective's Noah Lennox) has an enviable knack for making music that sounds like a thousand different influences but also like nothing you've heard before. The most telling influence on the third Panda Bear release, Person Pitch, being the Beach Boys, who are all over the LP's pop melodies; the vocals themselves, reverbed to the nines, have Lennox sounding as though he's Brian Wilson's grandson who's found a chest full of granddad's forgotten tunes.
Much like Animal Collective, Lennox's music is rife with futuristic whirs and effects but always retains a vivid, campfire-like history in its melodic sense and simple structure. Pitch‘s songs are repetitive droners (the percussion a vibrant collaboration of steady backbeat and dance insistence) but also ear-catchers, so that every moment is as pop as the last. Most of Pitch, with its loops and cycles, passes like highway miles, always accumulating and only relevant on the whole. An enlivening, engaging 45 minutes of atmospheric pop.
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