Panda Beaches

Panda Bear - Tomboy

Yeah, it's pretty great. I think the key joy of this album is just how hard it bumps. Not unlike Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion-transition from folk-jam freakshow pop to trunk-rattling (freakshow) dance-pop, Tomboy finds Panda moving away from the airy jangle of Person Pitch towards gut-punch visceral beats. Your favorite backpack rapper will, justifiably, probably try to rap over the breakbeat of "Slow Motion", and four-on-the-floor stomper "Afterburner" is as close to a traditional house track as Panda Bear is going to get. The less percussive numbers are often just as impressive - "Surfer's Hymn" beautifully gets at that stoned-Brian-Wilson vibe that was so great on Person Pitch and "Scheherazade" does sample-based minimalism and deeply poignant vocals better than anything James Blake has come up with. It's also thoroughly fascinating to see the kind of tones that Panda can get out of his guitar - for every instance where the guitar actually sounds like what it is, there's a few where its rhymthic strum is morphed into a sound wholly different and fascinating.

If I have a complaint - and I do, because I'm insufferable - it would be that Tomboy has an occassional tendency to succumb to No Age syndrome, which is to say that the songs here will sometimes avoid progression in favor of a kind of pointless repetition. The first minute of "Slow Motion" is as exhilarating a minute of music as has been released this year; the next three minutes of "Slow Motion" are largely indistinguishable from the first minute of "Slow Motion". It's not that I'm bagging on repetition as a musical style; it's just that on something like Person Pitch, the basic pattern of repetition was paired with a continual subtle build over sometimes 12-minute stretches - there was always the feeling of forward motion even if the album took it's time lingering on a particularly cool loop. Some of the songs here manage that kind of progression on shorter timescales - album peak "Alsatian Darn" in particular - but too often it feels more like the padding of a brilliant one-minute musical idea to full track length. Of course, those one-minute ideas are incredibly strong, so this is all a fairly minor complaint, but I think that's the key difference between this album and its classic predecessor.

Panda Bear -"Alsatian Darn" (mp3)

Panda Bear - "Afterburner" (mp3)



Dirty Beaches - Badlands

Best album cover of the year, certainly, and quite a piece of music to boot. As the Malick-inspired title suggests, Dirty Beaches (Alex Zhang Hungtai's solo make cinematic music that's largely about atmosphere, and thrillingly, it's a kind of atmosphere not often explored by other acts - call it the brooding, tormented proto-punk side of early 50s rock and roll. Hungtai gets a hell of a lot of scene-setting mileage about of simple technique, taking sounds and instrumentation that are time-worn and familiar - his Roy Orbison-esque crooning voice/yelp, a rusty electric guitar throb, and lyrical content about speedways, sweet 17s, and other Americana cliches - and twisting them into alien structures and contexts, like grinding minimalism aiming for creepy and relentless tension, or lovelorn ballads with a murderous edge. It's a concise little album but one that's tremendously effective - one of the highest compliments I can give is that Hungtai's name-checking of David Lynch and Blue Velvet is interviews is entirely apt and warranted. One could certainly throw the same objections about repetition here that I mentioned with Panda Bear, but it's more excusable here - experimental though it may be, Panda Bear in the end wants to make pop, while Dirty Beaches really just wants to get under your skin.

Dirty Beaches - "Sweet 17" (mp3)

Dirty Beaches - "True Blue" (mp3)