As Panda Bear’s most experimental album in 15 years, the largely acoustic guitar-based Buoys is soothing, subdued, and ultimately stale.
I’ve always considered the solo work of Panda Bear (real name: Noah Lennox) a gateway drug to his more experimental main project, Animal Collective. His first two solo albums were “out there” to be sure, but his 2007 breakthrough Person Pitch was full of cheery melodies comprised of looped samples that helped birth the mellowed-out electronic movement known as chillwave. His 2011 album Tomboy had songs like “Surfer’s Hymn” that were more 60s pop than anything else, and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper made the Indiecator’s top albums list that year, largely thanks to a couple of gentle tracks that sampled classical music pieces. Even within Animal Collective, he’s seen as the more pop-oriented member, as tracks like the smash hit “My Girls” featured him at the helm. Last year’s Tangerine Reef was the first Animal Collective studio album not to include him at all, and its occasional drift into harsher sounds could have been due to his absence. If there’s been one thing to count on Panda Bear for, it’s to pull generally inaccessible music back from the brink and make it more palatable.
Until now. Buoys is Panda Bear’s most experimental album in 15 years, and really throws a wrench into the whole “Panda Bear is listenable” thing. Much slower and stripped-down than anything he’s done before, Lennox trades layers of samples and synth-driven hooks for acoustic guitar strumming and increased vocal effects. This makes for an album that is soothing, subdued, and ultimately stale.
On occasion, you can appreciate the relaxed, seaside feel that Buoys aims for, inspired by Lennox’s adopted city of Lisbon, Portugal. The single “Dolphin” has Lennox singing in a low, gentle croon that he last demonstrated on the heavenly “Tropic of Cancer” from Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. “Token” uses a reverberating plucked guitar note to create one of the lusher tracks on the album, and if you can get past the lyric “a slap on a jelly ass,” there’s a strong outro line of “want to tell you that I want to” where Lennox’s voice really shines through. In a more general sense, Buoys is the folkiest Panda Bear has sounded since Animal Collective’s 2004 album Sung Tongs, largely thanks to its heavy reliance on acoustic guitar. Its presence on each track forms the backbone of Buoys, and most of the time Lennox modestly strums a few chords and loops them while his voice takes the lead. However, on “I Know I Don’t Know,” the guitar takes a more driving role, coupled with an ambient synthesizer line to make a satisfying psychedelic folk track.
More often than not, the tracks on Buoys fall victim to their own eccentricities. As calming as Lennox sounds on “Dolphin,” there’s constantly the sound of water rhythmically dripping in the background. This pee-inducing effect is a little much, almost functioning like a too-late contribution to Tangerine Reef. “Inner Monologue” is the worst offender though. Here, Lennox’s vocals are at their most distorted when he sings “one to one,” producing a uniquely repellent effect. On top of this auditory assault, the entire thing is performed over the sound of a woman sobbing and a tapping noise that makes it seem as if the track is skipping. This addition of various background noises is a recurring theme throughout Buoys, and it honestly feels a little arbitrary, as if Lennox couldn’t bear (no pun intended) to make anything too cut-and-dry and had to remind everyone that he loves musical weirdness. From the laser sound effects of “Cranked” to the engine-like bloops of “Crescendo” to the dripping sound reprise and excessive vocal distortion of “Home Free,” there’s more electronic distractions than assets. For such a relatively minimal album, it’s ironic that it could have done with an extra lesson of “sometimes less is more.”
The real of fault Buoys lay in how oddly uniform the album is, with no hooks and barely anything resembling a good melody within its half hour runtime. It has the same co-producer as Person Pitch, Rusty Santos, yet Buoys couldn’t be more dissimilar from its hugely memorable predecessor where each track was highly distinguishable. Even last year’s EP A Day With the Homies had more standout moments, while Buoys is more like Animal Collective’s garbled 2016 misstep Painting With. The leap from pop with experimental tinges to experimental ‘what-is-this’ with an occasional pop bit created a shock I haven’t experienced since MGMT released Congratulations after Oracular Spectacular. As a whole, Buoys isn’t a total loss for Panda Bear, and its deviation from the norm makes it ambitious in the same spirit as Young Prayer. However, just as Young Prayer’s nine tracks were all labeled “untitled,” it feels like this same non-identifier could apply to the tracks on Buoys.
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