In a recent interview, Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox revealed that a Lisboan healer recently told him he could count on not one but three personal totem animals – the bear, the eagle and the wolf. On his fifth solo album away from Animal Collective, then, Lennox meets the grim reaper mob-handed, with his very own fierce menagerie in tow. It’s an album on which hurt dogs, ecstatic anxiety and unabashed prettiness loom large, the interplay making Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper Lennox’s most accessible solo offering thus far.
By now, his 21st-century psychedelic modus operandi will be familiar enough to followers of American indie rock’s lysergic wing. Mantric rhythms unfurl to their own logic as disparate elements, digital and analogue, are layered in. Lennox’s vocal – last widely disseminated on Doin’ It Right, off Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album – isn’t always easy to latch on to, looped and distorted as it frequently is into chant. The compelling Mr Noah is probably the most disconcerting track here, combining yelping dogs, live-sounding drums and a junk-shop churn.
But … Meets the Grim Reaper is not a disconcerting album: on the contrary, Lennox’s blithe, kaleidoscopic side is uppermost (in contrast to the album’s 2011 predecessor, Tomboy). The vocals are sat upfront here; you can often make out actual words. Similarly, these 13 tracks feel like songs in a way a mainstream audience might understand them, rather than “sung tongs” (the title of an old Animal Collective album). Once the twitchy opening triptych – Sequential Circuits, with its trickling plays on water; Mr Noah, with its “dog” that “got bit on the leg”; and Davy Jones’ Locker, a 35-second oscillation that belies the presence of returnee producer Sonic Boom – plays out, tune follows tune follows tune.
Lennox “meets” the grim reaper in the same way dub colossus King Tubby might have met the Rockers uptown – collaboratively, playfully, rather than with direct antagonism. Lennox tackled his father’s death from cancer directly on 2004’s Young Prayer. Now, a decade on, this album’s keystone track, Tropic of Cancer, makes a kind of peace with the disease.
After an opening harp sample lifted from The Nutcracker, of all places, a lush islands feel dominates, as though imagining some kind of Avalon in Hawaii. “You won’t come back/ You can’t come back to me,” Lennox sings, but the loveliness is conciliatory. Animal Collective, through Lennox, have routinely invoked comparisons with the Beach Boys, and on this album Lennox is at his most Wilsonian.
Boys Latin is another celestial high, in which he ticks all the “symphony to God” boxes. It begins with a nifty bit of time-lag as the track saunters in. Soon after, Lennox’s vocal bounces around the channels in a kind of heavenly Doppler effect, negating the dark clouds and shadows of the lyrics. The closing Acid Wash is another ecstatic hymnal, this time on a delicates cycle.
In another interview, Lennox points out that his grim reaper is more about new growth and change than it is about death. “Change” may be a bit of a false dawn here. There are no wild innovations on PBMTGR; Lennox still sounds unmistakably like his peaceable bear self, despite having acquired some new carnivorous companions whose firepower, critically, he doesn’t need. He might be dicing with death, but Lennox, more crisply produced than before, is in shiny rude health.
