Panda Bear Medicine – A Review of Tomboy

Panda Bear, Tomboy

Why would I, a classical pianist by training, choral director by trade, and Hindustani singer by aspiration be drawn to Tomboy, the new solo release by Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear of Animal Collective?  Last spring, a student of mine, tired of me extolling music he’d never heard of, issued me a challenge: listen to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. He said the album would “completely change” the way I hear music

Not quite, but Animal Collective and Tomboy have changed my underwhelmed view of indie “band” culture. Even if Tomboy, Panda Bear’s fourth solo album, is heavily produced psychedelic rock with a debt to the Beatles and Brian Eno, it’s also bristling with originality and intelligence.

The songs are built on processed guitar tracks and feature lilting melodies with lush vocal harmonies, complex rhythmic play, and either static or simple harmonic progressions. Most offer refreshing twists on common compositional techniques. Afterburner, for example, plays with our expectations. It sets up a driving, if unusual, groove by alternating four measures of “3” with two measure of “two,” only to change the pattern a minute into the song. We feel the groove, but can’t predict it. Nice.

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Tomboy’s lyrics, like Zen koans, often ponder spiritual questions. But they challenge us not only to decipher their meaning but, as often, the words themselves—which are unpublished and swimming in sea of reverb. The vagueness can be frustrating, but the frequent, super-sustained vowel sounds vibrate like the meditative “seed syllables,” or mantras, of Eastern religious chanting; the vibration itself becomes a gateway to sonic experiences beyond literal meaning. It’s the idea behind “OM,” but it works for other syllables, as well.

If a vibrating low D# can create these patterns in water, imagine what the long, eliding vowels in “Drone” might do to your brain when Panda Bear sings “Now I see you again/Now I feel you again.” And the lyrics, like in a good Kirtan chant, easily double for human or divine love, especially given the organ-like underscoring and phrases in the rhythm of breath—like a meditation. It might be hard to achieve awakening in the four minutes of “Drone,” but would it be an “indie” album if it were too overtly spiritual? The way sound waves rearrange matter might be more scientific than mystical, but in any case, it’s cool.