Person Pitch

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
As a member of the acclaimed Animal Collective, Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) has for years been making music that mixes experimental structures with a pure '60s pop sensibility. On his second solo album of looped and layered experimental post-pop, he shows considerable skill in crafting songs that retain the essence of psychedelia while having been crafted with loop-based home recording methods. The album's finest moment has to be "Bros," a slowly percolating and unapologetically lovely twelve-and-a-half-minute song. Like Brian Wilson lost in a K-hole, gorgeous harmonies soaked in echo bump up against each other until they reach a rhythmic, fascinating crescendo. Elsewhere, Panda Bear's music tends toward the same effect a tad too much, often without the same transcendent quality. iPerson Pitch/i has fabulous moments aplenty, though (as with Captain Beefheart's 1968 iStrictly Personal/i) one does wish that fewer reverb-soaked vocals were used, or that they were used even further, pushed into complete abstract dissociation. i--Mike McGonigal/i

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Customer reviews

review by: Professional Alcohlic date: 2009-03-03 rating:
A Troop of chanting devout evangelical monks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Wow, what a description. My congratulations to J.Kershaw. It's amazing that someone who is talking of their dislike for the record has somehow managed to stumble across the best description of it's magic. If you have'nt seen the review yet, go and check it out as it is fantastic. br / br /Mr J.Kershaw, I applaud you. Although I certainly don't agree with your dislike of this beautiful and inspiring work of art. I won't bother going through the merits of each song as you can find that in many other reviews. All I'll say is that if you can't find beauty in a song like 'Bros', then I have a deep sorrow for you. br / br /Take my advice, lie down in a dark room, put this record on and experience the kind of high usually only reserved for illegal narcotics. br /

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review by: jamesewan date: 2008-08-22 rating:
Beach Boys in a blender! (8/10)
I'm probably the last blogger alive to post a review of Panda Bear's 2007 indie favourite 'Person Pitch' so I'll try to keep this relatively brief. It featured on the end of year lists of many music magazines and blogs and having resisted it for over a year I am suddenly unsure why I was stubborn about it. I have been an admirer, though not precisely a fan, of Animal Collective for some years now, but more importantly I am a fan of the kind of cut and paste, DIY aesthetic that characterises this album. So, on paper this should have been a shoo-in for me. br / br /If you don't know already, Panda Bear - also known as Noah Lennox - creates impressionistic collages from found sound, layered (home-made) beach boy harmonies and samples. Like his parent band and affiliate Ariel Pink, his music is imbued with a kind of heavily abstracted childhood nostalgia, almost an acid flashback to some indefinite sun-drenched 60s heyday when the kids were free and the pot was cheap. Again, as with Animal Collective, there is something volatile, almost nauseating about Panda Bear's kaleidoscopic, sonic sugar-rush of candy-coloured textures. Despite the warped cassette-mimicked distortion and tendency to rather overpile the ingredients, there is a kind of Beach Boys-in-a-blender orthodoxy to his music. There is a very particular vision, and Panda Bear explores this landscape tirelessly, even repetitively. The singing - lyrics mostly indecipherable - is used more as an instrument than a vocal. Heavy on reverb, they always sound detached, abstract, never entirely lucid. br / br /The joyous opener 'Comfy In Nautica' begins with what sounds like what I'd like to believe is the tracks of a big dipper - one of the those rickerty old Coney Island ones. A woozy head-rush of loops and harmonies, it recalls Caribou's similar, more polished album of the same year 'Andorra', but with a textural roughness that somehow places it closer to the 60s psychedelia that evidently influences both artists. The loop of a scateboard clattering over paving stones forms the basis for 'Take Pills', a drift of hazy psych pop with a little splice of stoner guitar: the sort sampled by Cypress Hill on tracks like 'Hits from the Bong'. 'Bros', the album's centrepiece, is 12 minutes plus of slowly morphing cut and paste. A bubbling cauldron of sonic ephemera it builds into a heady, almost maddening carousel of blissful noise. 'I'm Not' provides a welcome change of mood with four minutes of stain-glass ambience and a choral, even spiritual quality more Brian Eno than Brian Wilson. br / br /Thereafter, 'Person Pitch' doesn't quite hit the same heights. 'Good Girl' and 'Carrots' merge together to form another lengthy opus, but there are too many ideas being too loosely held together. 'Search for Delicious' is another ethereal ambient piece with a cavernous, Cathedral-esque resonance but is not quite as striking as 'I'm Not'. The closer 'Ponytail' is just a brief reprise of the detached, Beach Boys harmonies that informed most of 'Person Pitch' - a strange sickly brew indeed. If you like this, try aforementioned artists and albums, or The Ruby Suns 'Sea Lion'.

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review by: date: 2008-04-19 rating:
A nice cheerful early morning sound.....
I was introduced to this music by it's inclusion as a soundtrack on a spoof trailer on YouTube for Francis Ford Coppola's up and (long time) coming film of Kerouac's On The Road. The music caught my ear and I bought the CD. I don't look for anything deep in it, I suppose it's ambient with muscle, sort of stream of consciousness in music rather than words. Played early in the morning on a bright sunny day it fits the mood.

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review by: date: 2008-02-06 rating:
Not really getting it
Has some moments, but after trying a lot to see if there's more beneath the surface I'm not sure there is. I do like the way it shifts between tracks though, so there's no sense of any 'songs' on the album. Which is interesting enough in a way. 3 (more 2.5) but giving it the benefit of the doubt.


review by: Alex date: 2008-01-29 rating:
Amazing
This is a quite fantastic album - looking at the other reviews perhaps this isn't for everyone, but quite simply I believe this is one of the best albums of 2007. Give it a go - if its for you then it will stay with you for a long time. A beautiful and vivid summer album...

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