Panda Bear Fills Sinister Grift With Charm, Melancholy and Genre-Agnostic Curiosity

Before Noah Lennox, the Virginia musician who co-founded Animal Collective and parades professionally as Panda Bear, made Reset with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom in 2022, he was putting out records on an every-four-years basis, releasing Tomboy in 2011, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper in 2015 and Buoys in 2019. He switched from Paw Tracks to Domino in the middle of that streak, going widescreen but failing to really capture the amorphous discomfort of his 2007 opus Person Pitch, or, at the very least, upgrading it. But those Panda Bear albums were not bad by any means; in fact, Grim Reaper was fabulously predictable, especially tracks like “Mr Noah” and “Acid Wash.”

Person Pitch is the closest anyone has ever actually come to making a Pet Sounds-caliber album in the 21st century, that affection and craft lingers on Sinister Grift, namely in the grey brilliance of “Anywhere but Here.” Still, Lennox’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink use of ecstatic psychedelia, looping samples, twisting and tangling instruments and a sophisticated, guileless kaleidoscope of melody on Person Pitch remains the finest thing any of the Animal Collective cohort have come up with on their own. I mean, we’re talking about an album that not only changed Grimes’ life, but an album that was lauded by Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, Vampire Weekend and, recently, the matriarch of pop’s strange and wonderful underbelly, Jessica Pratt. The worst part about Person Pitch is that Lennox failed to build a worthy successor in the almost 20 years after. Until now.

Sinister Grift may feature some of Lennox’s best work since “My Girls,” but none of it is reheated. There isn’t a song here that will trap you in Smiley Smile dispatches like “Comfy in Nautica” or “Bros” did 18 years ago, sure, but “Praise” does get incredibly close. Instead, the triptych of “Just as Well,” “Ferry Lady” and “Venom’s In” brightens a new environment in Lennox’s know-how, reminding me of the way “Choo Choo Gatagoto” splinters into “Owari No Kisetsu” on Haruomi Hosono’s Hosono House, where the melodies fold into different bastions of catchiness and rollick through picture-perfect sequencing. Sinister Grift is more textbook and recognizable than most of Lennox’s previous efforts, full of well-crafted, old-school rock motifs, kinetic immediacy and very few risks.

Lennox’s 26-year commitment to Animal Collective is crucial to Sinister Grift’s success, as we get digital percussion, piano, synth trumpet and Prophet-12 from Deakin (Josh Dibb, who co-produced the album in Lisbon with Lennox), noise from Avey Tare (David Portner) and “sounds” from the always-present and nurturing Geologist (Brian Weitz). It’s the first of Panda Bear’s solo albums to feature all of his bandmates. Thus, a standout is “Ends Meet,” which features Portner and Weitz, along with Maria Reis and Lennox’s partner, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE vocalist Rivka Ravede. There’s some reggae fusion present, though it’s largely drowned out by the same sunny pop that vibrates out of the album’s other ace-in-the-hole, “Ferry Lady.” But “Ends Meet” is blessed by a pocket of baroque splendor, as Lennox declares: “Just keep it in the groove, don’t let up.” True to his word, the track sweetly paces onward.

“Ferry Lady”’s arrangement, before it turns into a menagerie of synth trumpets, wispy percussion and liquid samples, reminds me, if only briefly (and lovingly), of Sugar Ray’s “Fly.” It’s amazing what Dibb and Lennox are capable of when gamboling in each other’s company, as “Ferry Lady” trips through mellow patterns, bubbly scatting and copies of “lost in thought” pressed into different vocal mutations. These songs are not stripped to the bone like most of Buoys was six years ago; Lennox’s intoning on “Just as Well” gets turned inside out to the point where he almost yodels, and the forlorn coils of “Left in the Cold” collapse into the six-minute, uncluttered, atmospheric bruise of “Elegy for Noah Lou,” a song that zags into 90 seconds of chopped-up field recordings and sobering drones. The final dose of “Noah Lou” becomes a barometer for delicacy, as Lennox enters a vocal chamber not unlike Robin Pecknold’s on Fleet Foxes’ “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar.”

Though Lennox went three-for-three on pre-release singles, the first 12 minutes of Sinister Grift is among Panda Bear’s finest work, especially the 20/20, “Time to Get Alone” and “I Can Hear Music”-conjuring opener “Praise” and the left-field dub-pop that reinvents the conventions of “50mg.” Too, these songs offer a look into a vulnerable side of Lennox we’ve rarely encountered, as he fixates on love through different intervals of separation, be it divorce or the things that were said but not meant. This music isn’t broken, though; only bruised.

Sinister Grift is touched by the harmonious presence of Ravede, who not only came up with the cover artwork (you may notice its stylistic resemblance to that of SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s 2023 EP i’m so lucky) but sings backup on “Praise” and “Ends Meet.” Lennox’s daughter Nadja even performs spoken-word on “Anywhere but Here,” but the guest appearance on the marquee of this project is that of Cindy Lee’s Patrick Flegel, who recorded the “Defense” guitar parts at C.O.T.U. in Montreal. It’s important to remember that, when Flegel was in the band Women 10 years ago, his guitar playing was not only inventive, but downright crushing and apocalyptic. There are moments on the last Cindy Lee album, Diamond Jubilee, where Flegel steps into similar clothes, embracing the wardrobe of a mad scientist shredding through passages of charm, crunch and tinted, explosive pronunciations—especially on songs like “Flesh and Blood,” “If You Hear Me Crying” and “Government Cheque.”

“Defense,” which was ambitiously released as Sinister Grift’s lead single despite its position as the album’s closing number, is woozy and nifty, ransacked by Lennox’s fixation on colored, swirling repetitions of verse. Everything on Sinister Grift is circulatory, even when Flegel’s finger-picking turns up 13 seconds into the arrangement and balms the melody. Lennox’s stretching of “here I come” and “give me some” reminds me of fingers bending guitar strings just enough to let the notes breathe. It’s fascinating to hear a song like “Defense” unfurl, especially when Lennox’s voice finds its ascension, ticking warmly into a velocity punched by the lasering synths lurking behind him. And then, of course, there is Flegel’s slice-of-Heaven solo, a score free of any bells or whistles—to put it simply, his playing is tight, to the point and positively mad.

For 59 years, the music business has been trying to catch up with Brian Wilson’s genius. I doubt anyone will actually ever get there; an ear like that is forever singular. But, I commend the efforts of some of the Hawthorne hero’s most notable progeny, namely the Wayne Coynes, Rivers Cuomos, Matthew Sweets and Jonathan Pierces of the world. Lennox has, at the very least, figured out how to fit inside the shape of Wilson’s still-enchanting gift. But, in the genre-agnostic euphoria of Sinister Grift, he reveals a new truth, that many of his curiosities fall under the banner of Van Dyke Parks’ music more than they do Wilson’s.

It’s easy to hear Lennox’s slants on pop framework during an album like this and apply them to the same language that Parks’ own classically-minded explosions exist in. Critics do that whenever they catch a whiff of anything that slightly resembles the pageantry of long-gone hypnagogic acts like Dirty Beaches or Outer Limits Recordings. But, much like how Song Cycle inserted bluegrass, incongruous orchestras and show-tune melodrama into the conversations of out-of-fashion contemporary sensations, Lennox distorts the context of these 10 rock songs with elements of reggae, dub, hauntology, drone, cowboy chords, yesteryear pop centrifuge and dampened, diet ska. An album like Sinister Grift is not a convex mirror; it’s an I Spy book for multi-track savants.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.