Panda Bear: "Tomboy" / "Slow Motion""

In college we would gather around the MacBook and watch this over and over again, waiting with bated breath for the extra beat to kick in and turn “Bros” from a hypnotic Cat Stevens mash-up into something cosmic, pinning the track’s initial, inscrutable airiness to some metaphorical dancefloor. “Tomboy” itself is a fakeout, and its seven inch is one of those that the (now metaphorical) DJs would flip, with a demonstration of initiative, to better b-side “Slow Motion,” which very nearly takes Panda Bear’s sound to that promised next level. Exchanging samples for the real stuff, some dubby guitar is enslaved to a handclap polyrhythm, and if it’s not quite Panda going house, the way that the tone of the cut gets ominous briefly before opening up again is exactly the kind of unexpected movement one counts on him to provide. The layers of Noah Lennoxes that merge in and out of each other, harmonizing unintelligibly, are propulsive in a way he’s never really been able to achieve before, efficiently hitting all the right permutations, something that would’ve taken twelve minutes to reach three years ago.

Yet, on both “Tomboy” and “Slow Motion,” what’re absent are those things that made Person Pitch (2007) subtly rise above the chill wave of similar music (as well as his earlier albums). “Tomboy” wanders aimlessly through popping percussion and delayed guitar, vocals elongated but without the melodic depth that one would expect. It lingers in some middle ground between pop and ambient, in the sense that it never quite begs for your attention or fully resolves into the background, a kind of rough minimalism that is enjoyed best when unfocusing one’s brain. So: I can’t hum these to you on demand like “Comfy In Nautica” or “Take Pills,” but these are smooth little snacks I could munch on all day, not quite as flavorful but not so strong that I could get sick. I hope the rest of Tomboy is as bouncy as “Slow Motion,” and denser than either of these, but in any case it’s definitely going to be a successful Panda Bear album: immersive, layered, always moving forward. And that’s got to mean something.