[roopn]

gregphipps37 wrote:

Here's the full interview with Noah and Josh!

this interview is great Jordan and Greg! thanks so much

[meys]

FAF wrote:

domino sent my dl link a little early!!!

same! just popped up in my email like an hour ago. my LP+shirt combo is still "waiting for package acceptance" so this is a good consolation

[roopn]

my LP and shirt just arrived at my place! yay the message noah wrote in the liner notes is very curious indeed

[muark]

The only criticism I have is that some songs needed to be just a bit faster—namely Praise, 50mg, and Just as Well. But they’re so brilliantly made/performed that it’s not a huge issue. And tbh I’ve come around big time on Ends Meet so I have a feeling my perspective will change as time goes on.
Anywhere But Here and Venom’s In are the two big standouts so far but honestly every track from Ferry Lady onwards is A+.
This might be a hot take but I don’t think so as it’s so apparent but this might be the best sequenced album in the entire AC oeuvre. It’s a triumph.

[FAF]

wow elegy for noah lou is incredible

[destiny]

sequencing really is amazing. defense totally recontextualized on tgis album and i already rly liked it. def a top 5 ac song that starts with the letters def. had to think of tubby on the opening drum roll .. now im humming religious bop at work ..

[Dewey]

Anywhere but Here is maybe the standout track, at least of the first half, for me. I remember PB saying he wanted Buoys to have a salve-like quality, and this one feels like that to the extreme. It is so tender and melodic, yet haunting. Also maybe the most... soulful? thing any of them have ever put out. Feels good, man.

muark wrote:

The only criticism I have is that some songs needed to be just a bit faster

Yeah Praise is the only track I really have demoitis on, for that reason. It was so full of energy live, which really made the harmonies feel almost spiritual. It falls a little flat at this tempo and I think it's my least favorite track for that reason. Still a great opener.

coral lord wrote:

venom's in kind of sounds like a tomboy song to me, something about the melody of the chorus

I thought the same thing. Elegy and Left in the Cold remind me of a darker Tomboy sound too. The way the chords kinda build up conventionally and then take a left turn into something that almost sounds like choir music. Ancient gregorian ass harmonies.

[Hellomark]

Josh's synth solo in the middle of Just As Well, so sick.

[Spagett]

There is a new iTunes review + little interview with Noah where he shares some insight into a few tracks, don't know if it's been posted but thought some of it was interesting to share here.

Spoiler: show

Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavours from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.”

“This record” is Sinister Grift, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s Buoys. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.”

Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people’, we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album.

“Praise”
“It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.”

“Anywhere but Here”
“I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a [The] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real’, where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.”

“Ends Meet”
“This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash’. It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

“Just as Well”
“I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg’, which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.”

“Ferry Lady”
“There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.”

“Venom’s In”
“‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.”

“Elegy for Noah Lou”
“That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.”

“Defense”
“I was a huge fan of Patrick [Flegel]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before Diamond Jubilee came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”

[Hellomark]

Need someone to translate his daughter's parts on Anywhere But Here, so curious what's being said.

[coral lord]

we could beeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[wilandhugs]

Dewey wrote:

Anywhere but Here is maybe the standout track, at least of the first half, for me. I remember PB saying he wanted Buoys to have a salve-like quality, and this one feels like that to the extreme. It is so tender and melodic, yet haunting. Also maybe the most... soulful? thing any of them have ever put out. Feels good, man.

muark wrote:

The only criticism I have is that some songs needed to be just a bit faster

Yeah Praise is the only track I really have demoitis on, for that reason. It was so full of energy live, which really made the harmonies feel almost spiritual. It falls a little flat at this tempo and I think it's my least favorite track for that reason. Still a great opener.

coral lord wrote:

venom's in kind of sounds like a tomboy song to me, something about the melody of the chorus

I thought the same thing. Elegy and Left in the Cold remind me of a darker Tomboy sound too. The way the chords kinda build up conventionally and then take a left turn into something that almost sounds like choir music. Ancient gregorian ass harmonies.

YES the point you make about choir music is so on point. Honrstly I think it's one of the reasons I love Panda so much, his ability to create these "unexpected" melodies like church hymns are just genius. In particular the piano bit in end of the cold reminds me of the key change in the last note of "this is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad"

Always hated church as a kid it's genuinely surprising how fondly I look back on some of those melodies. Wouldn't be surprised if Noah felt similarly lol. need a playlist of that 90 year old woman absolutely PRODUCING beautiful magic in such a dingy place

[thelucky1]

Just some very initial thoughts:

- The slower tracks are the best but Praise and 50mg are the highlights of the first side.
- Geologist contributes a lot, especially in the second half of Elegy.
- Venom's In makes the Beach Boys comparisons make sense. It reminds me of Caroline, No and the tracks off the second side of Today!
- Defense should not have been the first single. It makes much more sense in the context of the album.
- With all of the contributions from Deakin and Geologist (+ the small one from Avey), this really could be considered an AC album.

Overall, it's way too early to rank it. Right now, I can't put it above PP, Tomboy, or Reaper but maybe that will change as it marinates.

[Daffy Duck]

Hellomark wrote:

Need someone to translate his daughter's parts on Anywhere But Here, so curious what's being said.

Found the lyrics on AZLyrics (don’t know how accurate they are, but it seems legit)
And translated the lines in google translate.

Sentado na varanda
Olhando para o céu
Conta as estrelas
Guardadas acima
Mas focado no além
É apenas uma distração
Porque, na verdade
Precisas-te consolar o coração

(Sitting on the porch
Looking at the sky
Count the stars
Saved above
But focused on the beyond
It's just a distraction
Because actually
You need to console your heart)

Perdido nas estrelas
É-lhe dito uma coisa
Que o nosso dever na vida
Consiste apenas em agir bem
Agir bem, amar bem
Tratar bem
Independentemente do retorno
Pois o que os outros fazem
Não nos cabe a nós

(Lost in the stars
You are told one thing
May our duty in life
It just consists of acting well
Act well, love well
Treat well
Regardless of the return
Because what others do
It's not up to us)

Amar é a maior bênção na vida
E quem o vive, sabe
Mas viver em constante preocupação
Torna-se um pouco macabro
Agir sempre com pureza
Alivia-nos por dentro
E só aí vemos
A responsabilidade do amor
Nesta vida, e na próxima

(Love is the greatest blessing in life
And whoever lives it, knows
But living in constant worry
It gets a bit macabre
Always acting with purity
Relieves us inside
And only then do we see
The responsibility of love In this life,
and in the next)

[Hellomark]

Thanks! I actually love that, feels like a great counterpoint to Noah's parts.

[Dewey]

lol I thought the "I'm getting tired, of sayin' the name" from Venom's In was "I'm getting tired, of sayin' your name" and I was like... JESUS, Noah, was it that bad??? Don't really like to view this album from that parasocial type-beat lens, but like with Young Prayer and Person Pitch, this record definitely has roots in his changing personal life.

[muark]

Alright, I actually have a hot take after a few more listens.
Just as Well could’ve been so good. But it’s not : /. I’m actually finding it annoying to listen to. It’s a fun melody, don’t get me wrong, but it is not strong enough to stand on its own and I’m surprised Noah didn’t think it needed some oomph, which it is desperately lacking in. It honestly sounds like a wiggles song. Every other track I’m enjoying a lot.
Update: I like this one now

[Emerson]

Man, I am really jealous of you guys right now.

You're about to get to hear my opinion on this album.

This is truly, one of THE albums of ALL the albums!

Supporting evidence:
-It has the perfect number of AC members
-it sound good
-it got panda bear on it

Nuff' said

[unrecordednight]

gregphipps37 wrote:

Here's the full interview with Noah and Josh!

brother did you cut the bit about the doncic trade or was that a joke tease i wanted to hear his take lol

[dio]

Unbelievable record. It feels kinda dumb to gush hyperbolic on day 1 especially with comparisons to old records. But it seems like the best since Tomboy right? It makes the melodies on Reaper seem too simple. The beats a bit cold. It makes Homies seem slightly too scuffed and obscured. Makes Buoys seem a little emotionally withholding and overly spare or something, And makes most of Reset seem a little heartless and compositionally lacking. Ever album for him is a great experiment but this feels top 3ish.

I do kinda want Danger in this style. An ep with Danger and Song for Ariel would be wild. But anyway ya the production is insane, it's like not just his best sounding vocals and maybe harmonies but every instrument just sounds like it's glowing and bright. Deakin wilded out, And it's also such a sick balance of modes for Noah all on one record. What is this like 50s/early rock energy he's channeling where it sounds so timeless. It's like a more direct way at getting at PP vibes and dare I say a more... authentic (sorry) way of getting at Resets vintage vibes. And also sounds like songs for like 90s anime openings?? The textures on 50mg and Just As Well are so gorgeous. I can't wait to play this on drives and get lost in the "wasteland" stretch. Some songs seem short but probably in a good way.

[dio]

God Praise is emotional. Unbelievable. Such deeply happy and warm vibes, lord. And I love that it's like. The epilogue to Buoys. It's that songs happy ending. Driving off into the sunset happy as fuck lol. Teary eyed from it

[MFpotus]

muark wrote:

Alright, I actually have a hot take after a few more listens.
Just as Well could’ve been so good. But it’s not : /. I’m actually finding it annoying to listen to. It’s a fun melody, don’t get me wrong, but it is not strong enough to stand on its own and I’m surprised Noah didn’t think it needed some oomph, which it is desperately lacking in. It honestly sounds like a wiggles song. Every other track I’m enjoying a lot.

Hey watch it pal that’s my favourite song you’re talking about

[rohcti]

AGGHHHH It's out! It not free birding is definitely making this a new AC experience for me!

[Dewey]

The darker tracks on this make Inner Monologue look like N64 music

[gregphipps37]

unrecordednight wrote:

gregphipps37 wrote:

Here's the full interview with Noah and Josh!

brother did you cut the bit about the doncic trade or was that a joke tease i wanted to hear his take lol

I did actually cut it but it’ll be a separate YouTube short tomorrow lol I promise

[Avey Tane]

Listening loud, glad I waited

[Avey Tane]

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut

Anywhere But Here is giving vibes like this immediately

[tealtimes]

AOTY contender, great job Noah and Josh and Brian and Dave and Maria Reis and Rivka Ravede

edit: can anyone figure out what else the bridge melody on 50mg sounds like, the whole melodic structure of it reminds me of the bridge of another song and it's killing me I can't figure it out

[crikit]

These vocal melodies are so classic Noah but also so fresh. This simply rocks and I’m only half way thru

[coral lord]

Starting a petition for all of Buoys to be rerecorded in this style

[tealtimes]

coral lord wrote:

Starting a petition for all of Buoys to be rerecorded in this style

It really does feel like Buoys 2 in the best way

[meemo]

coral lord wrote:

Starting a petition for all of Buoys to be rerecorded in this style

Where do I sign up for this

[coral lord]

The original Buoys (song) and Token have been completely overtaken by the Madrid practice versions in my mind. Imagine those with Cranked or I Know I Don’t Know with the full band…

[roopn]

Spagett wrote:

There is a new iTunes review + little interview with Noah where he shares some insight into a few tracks, don't know if it's been posted but thought some of it was interesting to share here.

Spoiler: show

Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavours from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.”

“This record” is Sinister Grift, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s Buoys. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.”

Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people’, we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album.

“Praise”
“It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.”

“Anywhere but Here”
“I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a [The] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real’, where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.”

“Ends Meet”
“This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash’. It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

“Just as Well”
“I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg’, which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.”

“Ferry Lady”
“There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.”

“Venom’s In”
“‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.”

“Elegy for Noah Lou”
“That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.”

“Defense”
“I was a huge fan of Patrick [Flegel]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before Diamond Jubilee came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”

this is cool

[dio]

That interview was sick. Lots of take aways. I want those tapes Dave made exclusively for Deakin and Panda (and presumably geo). And I want a full OPN collab sorta. And I thought it was funny they agreed Defense was a weird first single. If Praise isn't a single tomorrow then Domino really is weird. But I guess 50mg and Just as Well are equally single-y so who knows.

And Panda def seemed to imply that recording as a full band like must be really hard or sumn. Compared to him and Deak just chilling.

So ya we wanna hear Playing the Long Game, Song for Ariel, Danger and all of Buoys or at least the ones he played in Madrid or New tour in this style... but at least it sounds like he's actually thinking of a live release (!???). Also, I wonder if the songs they were doing with Dave and Geo are like... ac or side stuff or what

Great interview.

[roopn]

yeah live release is such an exciting prospect!
also cool to hear deakin talking about the octatrack era shows, even specifically the 930 buoys show which is the one boot from that era I've listened to many times. to bad it seems like no live releases will come of that era.

[Tropic]

The La's Noah's Pitchfork Perfect 10. We missed out on anco over/under so nice to finally land one of these

[kinetic]

haven't experienced this much ear joy since PBVSGR

now that the comeback is complete lets be honest buoys was mid af

[Stan]

Tropic wrote:

The La's Noah's Pitchfork Perfect 10. We missed out on anco over/under so nice to finally land one of these

Woah. I sent this to my mate whose favourite ever band is The La's. Exactly what it reminded me of.

[howsoever]

Happy release day! I recorded an interview with Deakin for dublab which is going to release in a little while. A couple of tidbits to note:

— Brian didn’t actually have a direct hand in the recording of the album. Noah requested a sample pack from him in preparation during the Time Skiffs/IIN era and ended up implementing a lot of the sounds into the songs.
— Noah and Josh were stuck on what Ferry Lady seemed to be missing and Noah, seemingly jokingly, mentioned trumpet. Josh came back with some synth trumpets and Noah really liked it.
— Noah was unsure of Elegy for Noah Lou being on the album. Josh insisted on it, saying that if he was working on the album, they needed that song on it. He came in early one morning and came up with a sound through the array of pedals he brought to Lisbon, and Noah immediately connected with it. They started tracking it then and there.

Hope to get the interview out there soon! It’ll include some inspirations Noah and Josh have mentioned for the album.