Panda Bear
Sinister Grift
DOMINO
You can take Noah Lennox out of Animal Collective, but you can’t necessarily take Animal Collective out of the producing, songwriting, singing Lennox when it comes to the drifting experimental psych-pop he creates as Panda Bear, or that solo project’s knack for layering sounds as if throwing on several sweaters at once. Borrowing a straight-ahead smattering of bright sunshine from AnCo’s airy 2023 opus Isn’t It Now?, along with the harmonic Californian glow of his own solo Buoys album, Sinister Grift is anything but sinister in its happy, shiny, tropical, hook-heavy display.
And, the grift? That might just be on us, the listener, as much of Panda Bear’s sequenced mechanical instrumentation of yore has been replaced with what sounds like live players and blunter rhythms. Back-ended with a short series of longer, denser, even spookier works that tend to loll in the sand, Sinister Grift’s latter half features the still-catchy-despite-themselves likes of “Left in the Cold” and “Elegy for Noah Lou,” sparkling melodic moments that come across like a sundown’s setting film score to something sadly violent—think the dusty, Spahn Ranch scenes of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
With that, it’s the blunter, live-sounding early songs of Sinister Drift that do the fast-moving, overheated, heavy lifting here, with their Caetano Veloso/Lowell George/Eagles vibes and the taught contagion of their songcraft. Yes, craft—because perhaps for the first time ever, Lennox has tuned his ears to the charts (albeit a Top 10 somewhere around 1973, and certainly an AM radio station in San Pedro). From the pedal-steel-filled “50mg” to the vintage Tropicalista electric guitars of “Just as Well”—and, of course, Panda Bear’s unusually silly-to-sullen vocal palette layered throughout the billowiest aspects of his mix—this new album is more charming and sun-dappled than it is sinister.
