Panda Bear
Tomboy

Animal Collective is the most prolific zoo I have ever had the chance to visit. And after having consumed "Down There" by Avey Tare (splendid, minimal, presomal, and other rhymes that don’t come to mind right now), I am about to do the same to the successor of "Person Pitch" by Panda Bear.

"Tomboy" immediately throws you off, there is soul, or gospel, or something that has to do with the soul of music that comes from the mouth and hands of Mr. Lennox, and we start to take real distance from the danceable moments of the previous work, here one thinks, here one enters a different dreamlike dimension, another plane of Animal consciousness. Emotional, there's the rhyme that didn’t come to mind earlier, I will apply it to this jewel that flows into my ears, like a blend of synth and hybrid spiritual chorality akin to the Beatles ("Last Night At The Jetty" is the offspring of an extracorporeal Lennox possession, in an acid trip of hovering electronics), thanks also to the return of the "guitar+voice" formula, okay, the guitar is so immersed in the synthetic that it becomes something else, but the body and soul of the solution are there, you can feel it, everything changes, no parties, just mantras, long, inspired and delirious ("Drone"), everything is geared towards the expansion of a universe made of camouflaged instruments, insistent/infinite notes, acid moments! The melodies become like a tide lost in time, there is no longer anything that is what it was in that studio, this record is not played, it is a direct offspring of imagination, tracks like "Slow Motion" and "Alsatian Darn" show how the guitar can and, perhaps, must be something else than what is commonly understood, especially in the "indie" environment, and it reaches out to explore splendid folk territories. And blue moments become the soundtrack of a Bradburyan journey on a rocket headed to Mars, immersed in the melancholy of eternal and yet cramped expanses, they take the name "Scheherazade", handbells like stars, played by invisible, motionless, infinite hands, until landing on an unknown violet meadow.

I too got lost in this space, in this zoo, in this moment, "Tomboy" consumed me.