Tomboy

On his first solo album since the commercial success of Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion unexpectedly raised the hipster cult heroes' mainstream profile, Panda Bear (aka Noah Wilcox) executes a rather nimble rethink of what was in danger of becoming an over-familiar sound. Panda Bear's previous solo albums were built largely on samplers and sequencers layered into a hissy psychedelic miasma that sometimes swallowed the actual songs. For Tomboy, Lennox de-emphasizes the samples and loops in favor of guitar-based effects and lashings of reverb. Producer Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember mixed and rejiggered the basic tracks in New York after Lennox recorded them in his adopted hometown of Lisbon, giving the album the spacy, tactile feel of Kember's own work with Spacemen 3 and his other projects. But unlike Sonic Boom's previous production clients MGMT--who seemed to choose him at random from a list of cool names to drop--Panda Bear has an obvious musical kinship with Kember: the collaboration feels entirely unforced and organic. The most crucial aspect of Tomboy, however, is in Lennox's newfound directness as a songwriter. Although he retains his fascination with repetition and atmosphere--one album highlight is even called "Drone"--Lennox has never before sounded as engaged and emotional as he is on tracks like the plaintive opener "You Can Count On Me" and "Surfer's Hymn," and the title track is the most fully-realized pop song of his career.