Send "Panda Bear " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 Tomboy doesn’t speak loud enough for us to hear it. It hums, rather; it mumbles. It actually can't speak. It posits a different mood than that of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Panda Bear’s 2007 landmark release, the welcoming and joyous Person Pitch. But the different mood suggested in its layers of sound isn’t the problem: said mood has no name, no voice, no discernable, definite emotion tied to it. After “Surfer's Hymn” jingles on through and promptly sets into full motion halfway into the song’s length with its quickening pace of rattling, clashing sounds and Lennox's harmonies, “Last Night At The Jetty” all but veers into a ditch, lumbering like a be-drunken bear full to the brim of its windpipe with a beehive of honey. The logic of the sonic change does not really need to be called into question; after all, trying to apply any type of coherent school of thought to an AC-related universe, in most contexts, is impossible. But the simplicity of Lennox’s genius is not at all on full display here with similar instances throughout the album. It’s missing. He’s suffocated somewhere beneath the murky textures and choppy, questionable transitions of Tomboy’s track order. And we simply can’t hear him, much less find him.2004’s Young Prayer suffered from such a conundrum as well: buried beneath the muddled music was the genius of Lennox, peeping his wee, nervous, little eyes out from a hole in the ground, unable to transcend his very presence, his voice, in an abstract way of speaking, into the music. Especially when compared to its successor, 2007’s Person Pitch, Young Prayer was an incomplete artistic statement, dreary as it was, yet unable to speak for itself these depressed sentiments. Tomboy finds Lennox in a like situation to that of the latter album, that is, in an emotional, creative transit of some sort, unable to find some definite voice for with which to speak. In “Drone”, he segues the drunken bear tones of “Last Night At The Jetty” with an, albeit obvious, drone of stretched harmonies and candid fuzz into the pulse and click-clack of “Alsatian Darn”. Hand-clap noises and a joyous vocal performance from Lennox near the track’s end then oddly lead into the piano-led melancholy and ocean sway of “Scheherazade”, without any compensation for the attentive, if befuddled listener in tow. 'Lead' is a little misleading here, actually, as when speaking of Tomboy and its album path, ‘leading’ is not the proper verb to describe the action involved, in any tense. 'Clashing', rather, suits the album and its flow better, unfortunately, which given Lennox’s recent music creation is surprising and conversely disappointing. Even Panda’s work in 2005’s Feels, an album considered by many to be Animal Collective’s most segregated and lop-sided (but in a good way) album thus far, was controlled, relatively, to the point where the vocal harmonies flowed with nay a hindrance in sight, the sounds and textures of his instrumental workings moved through the recording unheeded. “Afterburner” sounds like a mere afterthought. Closer “Benfica” slams the breaks on the prior track’s momentum, much like the upsetting transfer that took place to “Scheherazade” from “Alasatian Darn” before it, and ends Tomboy with a perfectly ambiguous, unconnected song that could just have easily fit somewhere in the middle of the album, or even before the very opener itself, “You Can Count On Me”....full text |
| Guardian |
| Each track on Noah Lennox's long-awaited fourth album feels like a revelation. Which is all the more remarkable considering how high expectations are: the Animal Collective member's last solo record, 2007's Person Pitch, topped several best-of-year lists. Tomboy looks certain to do the same. It's sumptuously textured and alive with ideas, moving deftly from reverb-soaked sunniness (the beatific "Surfer's Hymn" sounds like Lennox venerating Brian Wilson) to the fearsome propulsion of "Afterburner". There is a lot going on, all the time, but rather than being disorientating, its complexities are something to luxuriate and lose yourself in....full text |
| Bbc |
| The world Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, inhabits has changed remarkably since the release of his previous solo LP, Person Pitch. Back then, in 2007, Animal Collective – the band he co-founded in 1999 – were still a cult concern, their Strawberry Jam album about to collect a clutch of critical acclaim but make barely a dent upon the mainstream. It, alongside Person Pitch (album of the year on Pitchfork), did a good job of cleaning up the year-end plaudits. But it wasn’t until 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion that the Baltimore-born outfit truly connected with a wider audience, their eighth studio set breaking the Billboard top 20 and reaching the dizzy heights of 26 on this side of the pond. But the musical landscape Lennox strides so confidently across really hasn’t evolved all that much – Tomboy, solo long-player number four, builds on the summery vibes of its predecessor but doesn’t go so far as to truly break virgin ground. Titles like Slow Motion, Surfer’s Hymn and Drone are perfectly indicative of the content here, and will be pleasingly familiar to followers (old and new) of Lennox’s sublime drift-scapes. From Beach Boys melodies to mellifluous vocals which sink and simmer in a mix so luxurious to bathe in it would be heavenly, it’s full of prerequisites that point the way towards an experience comparably pleasant to that provided by Person Pitch. Where Tomboy differs is in its dividing lines – rather than seven tracks with a couple of 12-minute epics, here Lennox lays out a sequence of 11 shorter, standalone arrangements, less focus on a single-sit-down listen and one eye, certainly, on the cherry-picking nature of today’s downloading audience. Not that this offering is without its longer moments of full-body immersion: Friendship Bracelet is a stunning six-minute shimmer which entices with warm vocals atop chirruping tropical percussion, and the following Afterburner ups the tempo to New Order (circa Technique) levels, 80s synths pulsing away at the core of a track peppered liberally with busy beats....full text |
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