The last time the world heard from Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, he was in the company of Pete Kember, better known as Sonic Boom, co-founder of Spacemen 3 – the latest in a string of musical left-turns that have made Lennox the most prolific and intriguing member of Animal Collective. Solo, he has variously spawned an entire sub-genre more or less singlehanded (the sample-heavy sound of his acclaimed 2007 album Person Pitch effectively gave birth to chillwave), collaborated with Daft Punk, Solange, Paramore and Jamie xx, commissioned dub albums from On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood, and dabbled in a stark acoustic sound on 2019’s Buoys.
Lennox and Kember’s collaborative album, Reset, united two generations of psychedelic experimentalists in a charmingly playful musical dialogue. Among its delights was a track called Whirlpool. It sounded beatific and blissed-out, but on closer examination seemed to depict a failing relationship: Lennox later confirmed that his marriage to fashion designer Fernanda Pereira – who directed the videos that accompanied Reset – had collapsed.
It’s tempting to view Whirlpool as a starting point for Lennox’s new album, Sinister Grift. Much as Lennox has cautioned against viewing it purely as an album about divorce – a kind of lysergic Blood on the Tracks for Pitchfork readers – it’s hard not to. Lennox’s voice is stripped of the echo and electronic effects it’s frequently been coated with in the past: rather than simply one part of a disorienting wash of sound, it renders what he has to say very clear and direct, and there’s no getting around the fact that what he has to say sounds pretty despairing.
“I can’t let go, can’t say goodbye / A residue in spite of you,” he sings on Anywhere But Here, while his daughter adds spoken-word vocals in Portuguese. “Thought we’d be friends again … we can, but we don’t,” go the lyrics to Ferry Lady. “The days we spent, now we don’t care … weren’t we saying our vow?”
Initially at least, the lyrics are pitched against music that’s not just richly melodic, but incongruously sun-kissed. On Praise, bright melodies are thick with Beach Boys harmonies; there are relaxed rhythms that are Latin-infused (Ends Meet) or tinted with reggae (50mg), and the occasional hint of city pop, the lush disco-adjacent Japanese AOR of the early 80s. Just As Well features Lennox struggling to “get unstuck from the dark side” over a backing that sounds like a jaunty but forgotten mid-70s pop hit, the kind of thing that might have been belatedly exhumed for the soundtrack of Guardians of the Galaxy.
But then, just after Sinister Grift’s midpoint, the album begins to shift: the tempo dramatically drops, the vague hint of melancholy that underpins even Animal Collective’s most euphoric moments – the slight scent of sadness that you catch during My Girls’ lovestruck paean to fatherhood, or Fireworks’ giddy chaos – seems to gradually overwhelm its sound.
Venom’s In pitches a tune that sounds like a sigh against a backdrop of hazy guitar textures; Left in the Cold is foggier and chillier still. They turn out to be merely preparation for the six minutes plus of Elegy for Noah Lou, which recalls the late 60s albums on which the psychological wreckage wrought by the psychedelic era began washing up. Based around a repeated guitar figure that occasionally turns discordant, or threatens to break down amid splashes of synthesised white noise, it carries something of the fragile, halting quality of Skip Spence’s Oar or Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, and like those albums it has the uncomfortable feel of overhearing something rather than listening to it.
This is a bold, risky way to sequence an album: listeners entranced by the pop smarts of its opening tracks may give up and turn Sinister Grift off as the whole thing dissolves into mournful, introspective and abstract territory, returning only to cherry-pick the more user-friendly moments for a playlist. But if you pay attention to the words, you can’t say Lennox didn’t warn you, and for those minded to stick with it, there’s something striking and believable about its emotional arc: you don’t have to be recently divorced to recognise the sensation of trying to gee yourself through tough times but instead being consumed by darkness and doubt.
The journey leaves the listener in an uncertain place. Closing track Defense is more muscular than the ghostly tones that immediately precede it, but something of Elegy for Noah Lou’s haunted, halting quality remains. The beat lumbers, and there’s a great guitar solo courtesy of Canadian indie sensation Cindy Lee that would sound uplifting were it not slightly buried in the mix. “I’m trying to reset what’s inside my mind, the best place I can occupy,” Lennox sings. Then he repeats the line “here I come” over and over, a flicker of optimism at the end of a turbulent journey: tagging along is a curious and curiously powerful experience.
This week Alexis listened to
The Limiñanas – Space Baby
The French duo’s latest album reaffirms their garage/psych credentials – it even includes a version of Louie Louie – while Space Baby has guest Jon Spencer on fabulously bug-eyed form.
