The claim that Animal Collective changed the shape of experimental indie pop, not just for however long a trend’s shelf-life was in the noughties, but permanently, is hard to deny: 17 years on from their Strawberry Jam crossover, their influence endures in myriad disparate forms from Mermaid Chunky to Sun Araw and UMO. You might imagine that membership of a band so significant and distinctive would involve at least some wrestling on the part of the four individuals who maintain parallel careers, but the parent band-solo artist dynamic seems to be a mutually supportive, multiway street.
Noah Lennox’s latest as Panda Bear is clear evidence of these long-standing friendships with benefits. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and co-produced by Josh Dibb aka AnCo’s Deakin, Sinister Grift also features David Portner (Avery Tare, returning a guest favour from last year’s “Vampire Tongues”) and Brian Weitz (Geologist, credited with “sounds”), though it’s demonstrably a solo album – Lennox plays guitar, bass, drums/percussion, synth and piano. Sadness and reflection have always marked his records out from both his bandmates’ and the Collective’s but on 2019’s Buoys, Lennox increased the lonesomeness by streamlining his song structures, dialling down the effects and, most strikingly, singing in an expressive high croon.
He’s pulled the first two of those changes into the new album in a way that feels less dramatic because it’s a more uniform approach. That’s not to say the songs are of one kind, simply that they’re lean and immediate in nature, with a melodic ease that belies lyrics awash with loss and uncertainty, regret, overwhelm and defeat, feelings that sit right on the surface, undisguised. Tempting though it is to read them as related to Lennox’s putative split from his wife, as he told Uncut, “the songs aren’t strictly autobiographical. The feelings and some of the experiences referenced are inspired by difficult times I’d been through, but they’ve been expanded and twisted so as to assume a character of their own.”
“Praise” opens the set: driven by a simple, handclap-style beat and featuring Beach Boys-ish harmonies heavy on the reverb, it’s like being greeted by an old friend, an effect that’s amplified by “Anywhere But Here”, which sees Lennox’s daughter, Nadja, stepping up to the mic for spoken verses in Portuguese. However light and charmingly familiar the music, though, her father’s voice is weighted with emotion: “I’m crumbling within, can’t do what I swore,” he declares. “Not anymore/Because I can’t let go, can’t say goodbye/A residue in spite of you”. Though it’s no less melancholic, there’s a slight shift in tone with “50mg”, which suggests Kevin Parker on an early Beatles and Byrds tip, a touch of lap steel upping the existential doubt. With its mento swing, brief echo of “La Bamba” and simulated steel pans, “Ends Meet” can’t help but call to mind Vampire Weekend, while “Ferry Lady” is a poppier echo of Lennox’s previous dub/reggae excursions which unfolds the crosscurrents of feeling that run beneath relationships of all stripes (“thought we’d be friends again/Pushed to the end/We can but we don’t). “Left In The Cold” and “Elegy For Noah Lou” are of a kind sonically and temperamentally, standing apart from the rest of the record. The former is a gently undulating, melancholic meeting of Harold Budd, MBV and Radiohead circa A Moon Shaped Pool, the latter a delicately housed-up, winnowing submergence of guitar and electronics that tilts at both Scott Walker and Kompakt acts like Superpitcher. It’s also a welcome reminder of the innate, emotional potency of Lennox’s voice.
The album closes on a slightly ambiguous note with the steadily loping, psych-gospel pull of “Defense”. Featuring pivotal overdubs from guitarist Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee), it has the kind of bereft, radiant beauty that James Mercer and Jason Pierce might appreciate. Constitutionally, though, it’s a pool of exhausted feelings. “In some sense feel like I’m beat/Let down by your pride,” says Lennox, his voice rising and falling, clean and sweet. Later, “with respect/Trying to reset what’s inside my mind/This place I can’t occupy/Here I come”. It’s those last three words that carry tentative hope for the future.
Sinister Grift may not be a riot of experimentation – there are no extended psychedelic ragas, vast meshes of effects or dense sample interplay, and Lennox’s voice is seldom reverbed (clearly, he wants the words to hit) – but maybe he’s done with dizzying florescence. If at this point he prefers to see the wood for the trees, he’s earned the right.
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