Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Panda Bear

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

9 January 2015

Domino

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

The fifth solo album by Animal Collective founding member Panda Bear (né Noah Lennox), the partially eponymous Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, was preceded by a mixtape called PB vs. GR on September 11^th of last year, as well as the Mr Noah EP, a pair of singles, and the interactive website located at www.pbvsgr.com. All this hype-building is fine and good for sales, but really doesn’t mean fuck all when it comes to the quality of the actual finished product. For an artist who is undeniably one of the most influential in pop music over the last decade and a bit, every new release is met with very high expectations from the listening public. His previous LP, 2011’s Tomboy, suffered from the dizzying heights achieved by the album that preceded it, 2007’s Person Pitch, as well as Animal Collective’s unparalleled 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion.

 

So how does Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper measure up? Favourably, but that assessment doesn’t mean equivalency. Mr. Lennox gives us some very strong psychedelic pop experiments, such as the tongue-twisting single “Boys Latin” and the meanderingly elegant “Come to Your Senses,” but overall the album has a sense of self-satisfaction, rather than the exciting experimental abandon of his best work from the 2007-09 period. I’m not implying arrogance on the part of the artist; rather, Lennox seems to be more interested in refining his technique rather than pursuing fearless exploration. That said, there’s some great stuff here apart from the busy pop tunes. “Lonely Wanderer” is a delicate manifestation of a desert world mostly without beats. “Acid Wash” is a warped Christmas carol, something you’d likely hear sung in a church by a choir if it weren’t for the polyrhythmic noise samples and gratuitous delays.

 

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is by no means a weak record. It is, in fact, a very good record. But it is doomed to live in the shadow of its older brothers, Merriweather PP and Person Pitch. If you were to approach it without context, having no familiarity with Panda Bear’s body of work, you will likely be floored by the imaginative presentation of Lennox’s delicious psychedelia. If you’re a fan, you probably don’t give a crap about this review anyway because you’ve already listened to the album twenty times in the last week and have made up your own mind that it’s another classic in the Animal Collective cannon.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger