The Inner Child: Panda Bear's 'Person Pitch'

I can remember having quite an in-depth conversation with Emmy the Great about Animal Collective during a car journey from the Brixton Windmill to Camden Town.
I think this must have been around the time the group released ‘Sung Tongs’, something of a leap towards accessibility, but Emmy had their debut album ‘Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished’ on the car stereo. I had ambivalent feelings about this record – whilst it contained flashes of the inspiration the group have since distilled far more successfully, it was also fiercely combative, characterised by noise so high-pitched it induced headaches. I’m all for experimentation, but I wondered whether their electronic interventions need be quite so forced and malevolent. Emmy clearly loved the album, but I feel that the group’s more recent excursions, which have assimilated electronic trickery and improvisation far more comfortably, have proved me right. I haven’t really felt the need to return to that frustrating debut.

Noah Lennox, AKA Panda Bear, is the group’s drummer and singer, and whilst ‘Person Pitch’ is his second solo recording, it’s his first to gather a feverish level of excitement from the cognoscenti. Many are suggesting it is the best record yet from the entire Animal Collective staple. They may well be right. Panda’s debut ‘Young Prayer’ has, with hindsight, been judged as a little confounding and obscure, although I loved its powerful mix of percussive clamour and mantric chanting. ‘Person Pitch’ arguably adopts a much more coherent vision though, weaving infectious melody and even some comprehensible, affecting lyrics into its intoxicating sound collage.

‘Intoxicating’ is a tricky adjective inevitably implying 60s cliché, but despite Lennox’s rejection of mind-altering substances on ‘Take Pills’, this music comes very close to a genuine recreation of the lysergic sounds of the psychedelic era. It’s not just mere homage, as Lennox’s cut and paste use of samples adds a fresh and exciting impetus to the music. If Lennox doesn’t require drugs to achieve this, surely the more interesting it all becomes. The most obvious influence is certainly Brian Wilson, particularly apparent in Lennox’s meticulously crafted harmonies, but there are also hints of The Byrds’ explorations on ‘3D’, The Monkees circa ‘Head’, and in the imaginative collage approach, David Axelrod’s productions for The Electric Prunes.

Many critics described the early Animal Collective material as ‘childlike’, and there’s a sense of awe and discovery here that lends that description weight in an entirely positive sense. The music, constructed almost entirely from samples, is dense and compelling. It has the minimalist ethos of contemporary composition, layering a variety of sounds over what can frequently be reduced to just one chord – it’s far more about texture, mood and atmosphere. This effect is rendered brilliantly on ‘I’m Not’, the album’s summery, swirling centrepiece.

Lyrically, Lennox makes little attempt to avoid straying into whimsy, but this is an intrinsic part of this album’s quirky and endearing charm. On the opening ‘Comfy in Nautica’, he proclaims, with little sense of irony, ‘coolness is having courage’. Well, there’s probably some truth in that sentiment, even if most lyricists would stop short of taking it further than a private notepad. It’s almost as if Lennox is trying to recapture some of the perceptive observations that children can make, many of which get lost in the more mundane routine of adult life.

Lennox creates great impact from altering the mood of his constructions mid-way through. Whilst the 12 minute epic ‘Bros’, daringly released as a single, is hypnotically relentless, it’s the added layers of processed guitars towards the conclusion that elevate the music to a new level. ‘Take Pills’ shifts between a woozy, abstract introduction into something chiming, infectious and almost jaunty. It’s a shift both surprising and satisfying. For all the obvious reference points, ‘Good Girls/Carrots’, another 12 minute epic, is both primitive and disturbingly modern, with its pulsating rhythms borrowed from house music. The tablas that open the track provide this album’s clearest link back to ‘Young Prayer’.

There’s a playful contrast at work between driving rhythms, and the hazy somnambulance of the punctuating mood pieces (particularly ‘I’m Not’ and ‘Search For Delicious’). Lennox arguably saves the simplest, and perhaps the best, for last with ‘Ponytail’. At just two minutes, its brevity comes as welcome relief after the intensity of the album’s main expositions. The lyrics are simple and charming (‘when my soul starts growing, I get so hungry, and I wish it never would stop growing’) It also sounds wonderfully warm, a contented conclusion to a quite remarkable album.

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 - 2007

It's worth taking some time to mourn the passing, and celebrate the life of one of my American heroes, the great writer Kurt Vonnegut, who has died at the age of 84. Vonnegut had a genius for reducing complex issues and concepts to their starkest, simplest terms and was a master of dry, biting satire. It's perhaps for this reason that he always rejected the 'science fiction' box, although as a scientist-turned-writer, he was in a unique position among the great American writers, and able to highlight the pitfalls of a form of 'progress' that continually threatens to destroy civilisation. As a self-proclaimed progressive socialist and committed member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Vonnegut realised that left wing politics and personal freedom needn't be mutually exclusive, and his experiences as a PoW and of the Dresden bombings also left him a firm pacifist.

Vonnegut was perhaps unique among the great male American writers for his mercilessly concise prose style. The likes of Roth, Updike, Bellow and Ford opted for intentional verbosity, elaborate rants and lengthy sentences. Vonnegut summed up his sentiments in crisp, dry phrases ('So it goes...' etc) and his writing never contained anything extraneous.

Whilst many will remember the superb anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, or perhaps Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions as his best works, it's also worth noting his mastery of the essay and short story forms, as well as his emergence from retirement last year with his extraordinary 'memoir' 'A Man Without A Country' (not so much a memoir as a remarkably cogent and wise summary of where America has gone wrong, and, more impressively, even offering some solutions to put it right). Despite his initial hope for the world turning into pessimism, and his personal battles with depression (he once attempted suicide), Vonnegut still managed to make his allegories and satires blisteringly funny.

It is an extraordinary injustice (and one which we should not begrudge Vonnegut identifying himself in 'A Man Without a Country') that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. If any writer has better captured the ideals highlighted by the Nobel committee, I've yet to find them.

Many full obituaries will appear in the press over the next few days, but it's surely best to let the man speak for himself. Here are just a few of his edifying statements:

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."

"We are put on earth to fart around, don't let anyone tell you any different."

"I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second ... only one person benefited - not two or five or ten. Just one. ... Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that." (1977 Paris interview on the Dresden firebombings)

"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."

"My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'"

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. "

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. "

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."