Panda Bear – The Guardian – Album Review – 8 April 2011 (posted by Harry)
Panda Bear: Tomboy – review
(Paw Tracks)
Guardian Album Review – written by Maddy Costa
“A note of caution: listen to Tomboy for the first time after a frazzling day and it might just give you a migraine. Noah Lennox’s follow-up to his rapturous 2007 album Person Pitch is as demanding and nerve-needling as a hungry, tired three-year-old clamouring for attention. Take the title track: it’s relentlessly circuitous, Lennox’s droning vocal bearing down on an aggressively downbeat keyboard melody, which itself presses against an urgent guitar line doctored to sound like a sheet of metal being shaken. The whole album is like this: dense, oppressive and utterly hypnotic, so detailed and minutely inflected that you become helplessly absorbed. That’s partly thanks to Lennox’s enduring love of the Beach Boys, which coats Tomboy in honeyed, glowing vocal harmonies, repeated and repeated until they induce not a headache, but a calming trance. Even when the lyrics betray nagging anxieties, Lennox sounds joyful, illuminating the darkness of Slow Motion like shooting stars, breaking through Alsatian Darn like the sun through a storm.”
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