Panda Bear

Top Lyrics By
Panda Bear

Panda Bear "Tomboy" album

- Release date : April 2011 -

Tomboy is the fourth solo album by Animal Collective member Noah Lennox (stage name Panda Bear). Lennox mentioned Tomboy would be a departure from his signature sound on Person Pitch and Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion. About the new direction, Lennox said: "I got tired of the severe parameters of using samplers. Thinking about Nirvana and The White Stripes got me into the idea of doing something with a heavy focus on guitar and rhythm."

The first single, "Tomboy" was released on Paw Tracks on July 13, 2010, with a digital release following a week later. Another two singles, "You Can Count on Me" and "Last Night at the Jetty", were released later in the year on Domino and FatCat respectively. "Surfer's Hymn", the last of the four planned singles, was released by Kompakt on March 28, 2011 with a remix by London musician Actress.

"Tomboy" album tracks and lyrics

"Tomboy" album reviews

With its dense layers of music and found sounds, Panda Bear's Person Pitch became an indie rock standard-bearer almost immediately after its release. Trying to top it would be a daunting task, and on Tomboy, Noah Lennox doesn’t attempt it. Instead, he strips away the samples that made Person Pitch so hallucinatory and focuses on guitars, drums, and emotive melodies. A few found sounds make their way into the bookends “You Can Count on Me” and the beatific “Benfica,” giving the impression that Tomboy picks up right where Person Pitch left off, but the album’s overall sound is much sparer: the aptly named “Drone” and the smoky “Scheherazade” are downright minimalistic compared to what came before. Yet Tomboy is just as dreamy and hypnotic in its own way, with Lennox's familiarly looping melodies and structures coated in so much reverb and delay that an intricate collage of samples isn’t necessary to make these songs transporting. “Friendship Bracelet” is more than trippy enough as it flutters by on naïve electronics, while “Slow Motion” is submerged in dub-inspired effects and keyboards. Unlike Person Pitch's immersive miasma of sound, Tomboy takes a more song-based approach to Lennox's fondness for Brian Wilson harmonies and melodies. “Last Night at the Jetty” is a wistful, lysergic slow dance, surrounding vocals that could grace a Four Freshmen ballad with heady swirls of guitar; “Surfer’s Hymn” is a reconfigured teenage symphony that sounds like a memory of summer. Lennox recorded Tomboy in a basement studio in Lisbon, Portugal, and the album reflects those surroundings, providing a moody cocoon of sound to retreat into instead of Person Pitch's expansiveness. A feeling of loss often shadows these songs, and there’s a newfound sense of urgency, particularly on “Tomboy” and the fittingly soaring “Afterburner.” Meanwhile “Alsatian Darn,” which begins with chilly, ballad-like verses that warm into choruses that sound like an underwater folk dance, shows just how much more Lennox can do with less. Despite Tomboy's significant changes, it feels less like a radical shift than a subtle progression; while it may not be quite as dazzling as Person Pitch, it should still please fans of that album and Lennox’s many other outlets.

*** by Heather Phares, All Music ***

Tomboy, solo long-player number four, builds on the summery vibes of its predecessor but doesn’t go so far as to truly break virgin ground. Titles like Slow Motion, Surfer’s Hymn and Drone are perfectly indicative of the content here, and will be pleasingly familiar to followers (old and new) of Lennox’s sublime drift-scapes. From Beach Boys melodies to mellifluous vocals which sink and simmer in a mix so luxurious to bathe in it would be heavenly, it’s full of prerequisites that point the way towards an experience comparably pleasant to that provided by Person Pitch.

Where Tomboy differs is in its dividing lines – rather than seven tracks with a couple of 12-minute epics, here Lennox lays out a sequence of 11 shorter, standalone arrangements, less focus on a single-sit-down listen and one eye, certainly, on the cherry-picking nature of today’s downloading audience. Not that this offering is without its longer moments of full-body immersion: Friendship Bracelet is a stunning six-minute shimmer which entices with warm vocals atop chirruping tropical percussion, and the following Afterburner ups the tempo to New Order (circa Technique) levels, 80s synths pulsing away at the core of a track peppered liberally with busy beats.

Drone does just that, magically, Lennox stretching lazy vocals across hums and whirs which sound like one of those teenybopper hits slowed down into something approaching a celestial wonder on YouTube. Slow Motion sloshes about as if its maker’s toes are dipped in a crystal-clear sea; and Last Night at the Jetty throbs delicately with a lovely sigh in its lyrical step. And while much here can be summarised as more of the same, when Lennox’s natural quality control operates at such an admirable standard, that’s precisely why Tomboy is such a chilled-out triumph.

*** by Mike Diver, BBC Music ***