Can new music be really created? Can musicians really reinvent new sounds when so much has already been done? When you hear the last single from Panda Bear, released back in December but recently reworked to figure on his next album ‘Tomboy’, you may be led to think that even experimental music like his is drawn to repeat the past.
There is something so Brian Wilson in ‘Last night at the Jetty’, which starts like a underwater happy fanfare, and goes overload with reverb layered vocals echoing over themselves a million times. It’s dream pop of the 60s, with warm harmonies that open infinite comforting dimensions. The vocals surfs the song, occupying the main seat, filling all the room, with lyrics between dream and reality ‘Dreams that we once had/Did we have them anyways?’, and the line ‘who could say we’re not/just as we were’ is so soothing, you would just want to stay there a little longer.
I have listened to a few other Panda Bear’s songs from his previous album, and they sounded so much more like epic experimental affairs with unexpected moves and directions. I have also been to one of his shows at the FYF fest and the live experience was a total different story that had forgotten about these dreamy kinds of harmonies and was concentrating on the trance mode.
Although the melody of ‘Last night at the Jetty’ shifts several times, it goes into so much more familiar territory, with a little less repetition than usual for him, hey it’s only 4:38 minutes!
You still can download the track via stereogum, before his upcoming album ‘Tomboy’ drops on April 12th:
http://stereogum.com/637511/panda-bear-last-night-at-the-jetty-album-version/mp3s/