Review: Panda Bear – Sinister Grift

Sinister Grift is Lennox’s first album that truly shows off his knack for pop songwriting from start to finish.

 

Even though Panda Bear (real name: Noah Lennox) has one of the most distinctive styles in indie music, choosing an album that really exemplifies this has been tough until now. His 2007 breakthrough Person Pitch remains a fan favorite, but he hasn’t attempted anything like its cornerstone 12-minute tracks of looped samples since then. Reset was similarly sample-based and accessible, but was a collaboration with Sonic Boom rather than a true solo release. Tomboy and its successor Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper alternated between great pop melodies and more experimental features, while Buoys was just a letdown.

Sinister Grift is Lennox’s first album that truly shows off his knack for pop songwriting from start to finish.  Without the experimental effects or unconventional vocal choices of its predecessors, it’s one of his most approachable releases, and it still has enough depth and emotional range to be compelling. Co-produced and engineered by his Animal Collective bandmate Josh “Deakin” Dibb, it also features contributions from fellow Animal Collective members Brian “Geologist” Weitz and David “Avey Tare” Portner. This makes Sinister Grift  the first Panda Bear solo release to include everyone from Animal Collective, and the album benefits from this collaborative spirit.

The first slew of tracks on Sinister Grift are all chilled-out pop songs that emanate good vibes. While namedropping the Beach Boys in a Panda Bear review is beyond a cliché at this point, playing the sunny opening track “Praise” around someone who’s never heard Panda Bear is almost definitely going to elicit a “wow, this sounds like the Beach Boys!” The handclaps, backing vocals (by Portuguese singer Maria Reis and Spirit of the Beehive bassist/Lennox’s partner Rivka Ravede) and drawn out “oohs” really hammer in the cheerful tone, and it’s a great start to the album.

There’s a bit of a tropical vibe to this part of Sinister Grift, and on tracks like “50mg” you can hear a lap steel guitar that’s most often associated with Hawaiian music. It’s also got a bit of a reggae sound to its synthesizers and drums, and Lennox’s trick of trading vocals back-and-forth with himself is something few others could pull off. The single “Ends Meet” has a Caribbean feel in its chord progressions and beat, and the drawn out “oohs” of “Praise” make a welcome reprise here as Lennox asks “what else can I do?”

All of these tracks really hammer in the bright mood between their vocals and instrumentals, but right around halfway through Sinister Grift, you may begin to tire of this uniformity. Thankfully, Lennox pre-empts this desire for variety by turning the album’s latter half noticeably darker. This is a very gradual, subtle shift, as the track “Ferry Lady” has the upbeat melody of a pop song that belies its longing lyrics about a friendship or other relationship ending. Beneath its Tomboy-era synthesizers and unexpected horns, you’ll notice a chorus that begins “thought we’d be friends again, pushed to the end, we can, but we don’t.” The following track “Venom’s In” has fewer contrasts, with a drearier tone that fits lines like “there’s a bullet aimed at you, and there’s nothing you can do.” It’s still a pop song, albeit a more introspective, confrontational one. The same goes for “Left in the Cold,” which has an ethereal, lo-fi guitar line (think of the musician Bibio) that straddles the line between folk and psychedelic. While Lennox’s voice is still there to provide some comfort, it’s markedly different from the optimism of “Praise.”

Sinister Grift’s turn away from the light culminates in the penultimate track “Elegy for Noah Lou.”  The quietest, longest, and most somber song on the album, it features little more than Lennox singing over sparse acoustic guitar notes with minimal electronic effects. Lennox’s relatively unadorned vocals allow him to give his most heartfelt vocal performance since “Tropic of Cancer” on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and it stands out on both the album and everything he’s released before.

If Sinister Grift has a shortcoming, it’s that the instrumentals are a little lackluster, particularly on the first half of the album. If “Anywhere But Here” didn’t feature Lennox’s daughter Nadja speaking some philosophical lines in Portuguese in between its verses, it’d be hard to think of a distinguishing feature. The melody of “Just as Well” alternates between a handful of electric guitar riffs and some cute-sounding synthesizer notes, but the guitar’s shuffling chords make the instrument seem underutilized. On the contrary, the album’s closing track “Defense” really benefits from a guest appearance by Cindy Lee, who provides its twangy guitar riffs and even throws in an energizing solo. It doesn’t quite fit the album’s descent into darkness post “Ferry Lady,” but ending with “Elegy for Noah Lou” could have been too much of a downer conclusion. There’s a bit too much repetition throughout Sinister Grift, and it’s not until Lee’s work on “Defense” that you’ll realize that most songs rely too heavily on Lennox’s vocal performance.

Sinister Grift is not as groundbreaking as Person Pitch, meaning it’s unlikely to spawn any microgenres (i.e. chillwave) or inspire other bands to ape its style. Lennox is just as established as a solo artist as he is a member of Animal Collective, and he’s unique enough that you can pick him out during a 15-second appearance on Jamie xx’s album In Waves last year. Sinister Grift’s greatest strength is that for the first time, you have an album that really highlights how Lennox has become so well-known and celebrated.

Rating: 7.5/10