Panda Bear is a mystery to me, and this is the beauty of him and his music. Noah Lennox has dropped a second single off his upcoming ‘Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper’, and the song ‘Boys Latin’ even comes with a very poetic animation video.
The music is very Lennox, electronic weirdness bubbling and boiling in repeat behind his vocals in loops, biting each other’s tail,… it doesn’t belong to anything you can hear beside Panda bear, it’s super repetitive and eerie as anything that he has done, it’s almost religious music in the hymn or choir sense of the term, and the song sounds like something escaped of ‘Tomboy’, Panda bear’s previous album.
However, it also becomes the soundtrack of an adventure, a freaky journey of a young man (may be Lennox himself) through a colorful and watery landscape, whereas he is affected by a strange metamorphosis after making contact and being sucked by a sort of giant blue anemone… Of course the first reaction will be to associate all this psychedelic poetry to an acid trip but it may be a bit too reductive, as there is meaning all over the story as the young man is helping other people to escape the anemone-induced disease… may be it’s addiction? It’s plausible, looking at the way it sucks and traps people, although this following explanation floats on Animal Collective message board:
‘’the anemone is the agent of change. the figures in the video touch the anemone to begin the process of transformation. so in the context of the album the anemone represents the reaper.”
So the whole thing could be about the fear of change and transformation? As I said Panda Bear is a mystery and intends to stay that way. He nevertheless declared this to Rolling Stone:
‘I’m not a psychedelic warrior by any means, but that’s an element of music that I find to be very psychedelic: when everything mixes in weird ways and you can’t tell what’s what.That’s when quasi-magical stuff starts to happen; when things start tricking my ear and my brain. One of my favorite questions is asking people how they define psychedelic music. For me, it has something to do with things tricking your ear, when things are more than the sum of their parts. I feel like that’s the target always with my music, the psychedelic sweet spot.’
I have never really associated Panda Bear’s music with psychedelia… ‘Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper’ is set to arrive on January 13th.
