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Panda Bear

Tomboy/Slow Motion
Paw Tracks

myspace.com/pandabear

My excitement for new music has the unfortunate tedency to peak only once every ten years, this was during 1997 and 2007 if you want to be specific. Now, given that the contemporary life expectancy is reduced to whatever age they are in the winter of 2012 I have been hopeful that this pattern will change. Thankfully this year my hopes had already been answered in the form of excellent releases from Flying Lotus, LCD Soundsystem, Spoon, Mr Oizo, Arcade Fire and potentially even Radiohead. But wait, aren’t all these just artists that released material in 2007? Yes, they are.

But in each example the music has changed, dramatically. Much the same can be said (and it has) about the new Panda Bear single Tomboy, which sees a radical departure from 2007’s dreamy jangle pop soundscapes of Person Pitch into something haunting, penetrating and unhinged. Tomboy carries the inherent reverb of Noah’s so-high-and-angelic-I-could-eat-a-fucking-star vocal in a rickety guitar journey across a landscape very distant from the imagined beaches we laid on in 2007. The year is 2010 and excited barely defines my hurried approach to the haunted festivals that are promised in the filtered wobbles, punctuating handclaps and uncertain delight of the incredible b-side Slow Motion. It’s simultaneously exactly what I hoped and expected from Noah Lennox, and yet totally different. A trend that hopefully continues as being excited about new music and then being rewarded with something slightly different and new feels good man.

Stanley