It feels like Panda Bear’s ‘Tomboy’ has been coming for an eternity. First mentioned way back at the start of 2010, Noah Lennox’s follow up to his enduring masterpiece ‘Person Pitch’ has since been drip-fed to the public as a steady stream of singles and bootlegs. The teasing run up to the release of ‘Tomboy’ has been in stark contrast to the shock announcement of Radiohead’s ‘The King Of Limbs’ last month but these two polar opposite approaches to marketing have had effectively the same end result. With each new piece of information that emerged, ‘Tomboy’ was further mythologized by expectant fans and its long awaited release now carries with it that the all too rare feeling of a universal musical event.
As Lennox reassures his listeners “know you can count on me” at the opening of the record, ‘Tomboy’ immediately sounds like business as usual for Panda Bear. The soaring vocal harmonies of You Can Count On Me display all of Lennox’s usual purity of melody, climbing slowly but deliberately atop whispering voice samples. The welcoming sound of Noah’s choirboy vocals is a familiar one but the production on ‘Tomboy’, handled by Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember, is altogether more expansive than the bedroom lo-fi of ‘Person Pitch’.
Kember’s involvement seems to have pushed Noah’s sound further towards that of his recent work with Animal Collective and, whilst the production on ‘Tomboy’ is impressively wide-screen, the heavy use of trippy effects can become grating as the album progresses. With the exception of Friendship Bracelet, whose otherwise pretty melodies are all but destroyed by an obnoxious tremolo effect layered all over the vocals, the garish production on ‘Tomboy’ is more of a minor annoyance that a fundamental issue. Many of the tracks on ‘Tomboy’, such as Surfer’s Hymn and the hypnotic Slow Motion, succeed despite overly busy arrangements.
The linear ebb and flow that characterised the songs on ‘Person Pitch’ was symptomatic of Lennox’s use of sampling in the composition process, layering slowly unfolding vocal melodies over a hazy bed of interlocking loops. ‘Tomboy’, on the other hand, was written mostly on live instruments prior to recording, affording Lennox the freedom to take a more spontaneous approach to structuring his songs. Last Night At The Jetty and Alsatian Darn swiftly negotiate multiple sections, the latter calling to mind Fleet Foxes initially before spinning off into the stratosphere with some of Lennox’s most gorgeous melodies to date.
Under the weight of such wild expectations, one could be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed that ‘Tomboy’ is merely a set of eleven songs by a human man. Indeed, it will be a long time before ‘Tomboy’ can be viewed outside of the context of its delayed release and even longer before it can be discussed without some mention of its towering predecessor ‘Person Pitch’. For now though, ‘Tomboy’ is another excellent record from one of popular music’s most talented songwriters, and that’s more than enough.