Panda Bear
Person Pitch
Paw Tracks
Anyone familiar with Animal Collective’s body of work won’t be surprised to hear the same production approach of reverb saturation applied to band member Panda Bear’s latest solo recording. If anything, Person Pitch is a complete continuation of Panda’s nautical pop explorations – taking classically simple melodies, drowning them in echo and coloring in the waves with ephemeral incidental noise. Take the track “I’m Not” for instance, behind the eternal bounce of bass and Panda’s multi-tracked vocals lurk arrhythmic, unclassifiable sounds like those of a tanker’s hull beating its moorings and digitized steel drums.
It’s an interesting take on psychedelica, where the experimentation takes place in the production rather than the performance. There’s an otherworldly air to the backward-spinning “Search For Delicious” that doesn’t feel as synthetic as its instruments of creation could lend to it. Instead, when Panda Bear places these weird forays up against his pop sensibilities and his field-recorded incidentals, he makes for a compelling and messy masterwork that’s as much post-modern collage as the album’s cover art.
Paw Tracks: http://www.paw-tracks.com
