Panda Bear
Person Pitch

THE REVIEW

When you least expect it, an album comes out that surprises you, takes you like a sweet obsession, capturing you without fail in its hypnotic coils. Accessible yet stimulating, with a surreal otherworldly quality, made of echoes and reverberations, beautiful noises and sounds that marry with sunny and explosive melodies: it's spring and Panda Bear knows it well.

In one fell swoop, he manages to surpass everything he did with the Animal Collective by finding a magical balance: ever more accessible, appealing, pleasant like a caress for the weary ear and at the same time distant, elusive, mysterious like the best passions, the lasting ones. A virtuous short circuit where you sound trippy without resorting to overused clichés, reworking old sounds (Beach Boys) making them sound new, unprecedented, unheard of. The specter of Pet Sounds hovers over the entire album but it is not a false, artificial reincarnation, rather it is the spirit of those mythical sessions that finds new life by bathing in fertile waters. Is the masterpiece "Bros" with its lysergic tail of overlapping sounds or "Good Girl/Carrots" that unfolds in three parts each more beautiful than the last? Or maybe both? 12 minutes each that pass timelessly as if they were, not hymns to God, but to the Divine. And what impact did Lisbon have on these relaxed, oceanic atmospheres?

Panda Bear finds himself far from his native America, quenching his thirst from the source of life on the opposite side of the world. And he gifts us with a series of beautiful, clear, obsessive melodies mounted on repetitive bases of absolutely warm, welcoming, human electroacoustic music. In short:  what kind of album is it? Brian Wilson meets the Hare Krishna and together they decide to celebrate with LSD cakes, that's what kind of album it is! An essential release of 2007.