#342 Panda Bear – Last Night on the Jetty

Getting deeper into the new Panda Bear album, I can’t help but be reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s response when asked to explain why his 1965 film Pierrot le fou featured a copious amount of blood — the cavalier French filmmaker replied that “it’s not blood, it’s red”. A dense and lustrous sonic spree that builds on and yet departs from the kaleidoscopic pop of his third album Person Pitch (2007), Noah Lennox’s new songs have the tendency to slip into streams of wild abstracted beauty that make for some of the most illuminating moments on Tomboy. Take “Last Night At The Jetty”, a daytripper’s threnody seemingly executed in slow motion, its vistas of sound and undersea melodies lined together in hallucinatory dreamtime. – Keith.

mp3: Panda Bear – Last Night At The Jetty

Panda Bear’s Tomboy is available on Paw Tracks.

#192 atlas sound – walkabout (ft. noah lennox)

what did you want to see, what did you want to be when you grew up? it’s a perfect question posed by a duo still reveling in childlike wonder, both currently making music that touches the oldest of souls. it’s a fairytale collaboration just waiting to be made, taking place under the envelop of bradford cox’s solo atlas sound project, and featuring the buoyant vocals of animal collective’s noah lennox, aka panda bear. the fruit of that partnership is “walkabout”, a track revolving the simplest of loops, built upon a sample of “what am i going to do” by the dovers, and circling playfully around the theme of childhood dreams. it’s a song that hops and skips from one idea to the next, but never deviating far from the central question. the contribution of panda bear is distinct beyond his vocal contributions, especially with the incorporation of field samples that invoke both the faraway and vaguely familiar and which blend perfectly with cox’s signature dreamscapes. this sounds like the meeting of long lost playground buddies, meeting when they’re both grown up and finally ready to make a song to last a lifetime, and for me possibly the best thing i’ve heard all year.

mp3: atlas sound – walkabout (ft. noah lennox)

“walkabout” is featured on atlas sound’s upcoming album logos, out on kranky 20 oct.