(Paw Tracks)
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That Person Pitch is beautiful noise is not easy to dispute. But how is it that music as preoccupied as Panda Bear's with humbling, ornate grandiosity comes off as cerebral? It's built on feeling, but a lot of its twiddling comes off as ineffective gimmicry, at least to a skeptic. One can love the idea of Animal Collective without actually being able to let go and get down with them; their music is absurdly layered and difficult, and the same goes for Panda Bear. It doesn't even seem actually possible not to find this music impressive, or not to be moved by some of it, but seldom has a pop music enterprise existed that can generate this level of mixed feeling.
Noah Lennox gets off on towering, sample-heavy flights of fancy that at times produce sounds as gorgeous as recorded pop music is ever likely to generate. The loopy Gregorian chant spliced with synthpop on "Im Not" is flooring and immediate, and grows more spectacular as it moves. These are almost always immediately followed by insufferable side trips into seemingly deliberate annoyance (the painful repetition on "Comfy in Nautica") or a sort of electronic noodling that brings on uncomfortable thoughts of canned prog, but as college rock has embraced '70s excesses, perhaps it's the unlucky cool kid left in the dust who can't tolerate this direction. I'm a hardly a cool kid, I admit, but I also have to admit that the wonky indulgences of "Bros" make me feel seasick. Perhaps I'm just getting too old to accept another kind of traditionalism? Don't know.
I don't really know much about the modern twist on dreampop that the recent Animal Collective records have helped pioneer. I do know a fair bit about the Beach Boys, and I have to confess that as much as I enjoy seeing Smiley Smile get its critical due at last (it's better than Sgt. Pepper, you know), when I hear something like "Bros" and hear everyone telling stories about how they thought it was an obscure Beach Boys track, I die a little inside. Yeah, it sounds like the Beach Boys, as filtered through the bedroom project of a middle-aged Gentle Giant and Sigur Ros fan who reads some blogs about electronica. I know the comparison (not an insult, I implore you) is flawed because such blogs were less common in 2007 and many elements of the internet music scene as it stands today were likely founded as a result of records like Person Pitch, which is already a classic in many circles. Yet if anything, "Take Pills" betrays a longer Beach Boys shadow by attempting to evoke the sound of Western and Gold Star on tape. But "Bros" is very distinctly based on surface-level sound and feel, and has nothing to do with any element of the Beach Boys that made them interesting, by which I mean their songs. This vague teasing of fragments and otherworldly noise is, however, the direction in which Brian Wilson seemed headed with the Smile project in 1966, and I'm one of the evil bastards who thinks that was a terrible idea and that Wilson was right to shelve it. Which means we should probably move on.
Aside from the twelve-minute dud that is often cited as the centerpiece of the album (and one of the best of the decade, oh shudder) and the obtuse workout "Search for Delicious," the record is solid and artistically impressive, though it demands constant attention and fails as background entertainment. Another lengthy cut, "Good Girl/Carrots," is less irritating; it still has inexplicable moments, but Lennox's beautiful, flexible voice saves much of it automatically, and because the song is a constantly shaking and shifting foundation, it retains its cutting impact for the duration, particularly as it drifts into piano psychedelia and irresistibly rhythmic pop. It's difficult to ignore, though, that Panda Bear is loveliest at his most direct on a simple, melodic production like the closing "Ponytail." Is it terrible of me to want him to just slather it all with electric guitars and let the knobs fall off? I hate it when I feel like songs are hiding from me.
Much of this is a personal fault. Disregarding Ariel Pink, the "Chillwave Problem" is becoming an issue for me in my old age. I am all in favor of new things being done to rock & roll. I was with you on lo-fi and shoegaze and dreampop, fine. But the creaky conjurings of the pop past that have taken over indie consciousness are beginning to bug, and it's not an objection to the music so much as an annoyance with the idea that increasingly young folks with guitars isn't enough of a future, and that when we praise them we have to add a million interjections about how "oh, of course they don't do anything new." Check it: in 2007, Person Pitch wasn't anything new either, and yet somehow it's still pretty good! "Take Pills" is a fucking Motown song, guys, obsessively (and perhaps unnecessarily) slathered with effects to make it sound distant, not so much to disguise its influences as to reframe them, and yet wouldn't it be kind of awesome to hear it without the big "art" stuff on top of it? A song could just be a song and not a song used as a vehicle for a statement about sonics? I suppose I'm just blathering here about aesthetics, but I think it goes a long way to personally justify why I admire Animal Collective and Panda Bear a lot without really needing to hear them very often.
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