Collected Animals

‘Reset’ by Panda Bear & Sonic Boom Review: A Cheerful Collaboration
Noah Lennox and Peter Kember come together on this album that uses samples of ‘50s and ‘60s tunes to create unmistakably good vibrations.

Sometimes an album is designed to help the listener understand where its creators are coming from, or perhaps to allow him or her to think more deeply about complicated issues. And sometimes records aim for something more elemental. When Noah Lennox, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter raised in Baltimore who is a member of the experimental band Animal Collective and records as Panda Bear, began working with Peter Kember, the 56-year-old from Rugby, England, who as Sonic Boom served as co-leader of the seminal psych-rock band Spacemen 3 in the 1980s and early ’90s, their remit was simple: Make songs that would help listeners feel better during these troubled times.

This experiment in uplift led to the wonderfully life-affirming new LP “Reset” (Domino), out Friday. The duo, both now based in Portugal, previously worked together on two of Mr. Lennox’s solo albums as Panda Bear—“Tomboy,” from 2011, and “Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper,” from 2015. On those records, which mixed indie-pop tunefulness with darker and more experimental undertones, Mr. Kember was strictly a producer, helping Mr. Lennox realize his creations. Here, they are full collaborators, sharing writing, singing and production duties across nine cheerful and affecting numbers that encourage us to hold on to hope, and revel in the magic of the present moment.

Five of the record’s nine tracks are built around brief loops taken from the introductory bars of well-known songs from the 1950s and ’60s. The opening “Gettin’ to the Point” is a statement of purpose in both title and content—it’s constructed atop a fragment of an acoustic guitar part borrowed from Eddie Cochran’s hit “Three Steps to Heaven,” released around the time of the ill-fated rockabilly star’s death in 1960. The chiming, circular riff plays through the entire track as Mr. Lennox sings a graceful new melody on top of it that points to the styles of days gone by. Since early in his career at the dawn of the millennium, Mr. Lennox’s vocal timbre and phrasing have been compared with those of Brian Wilson. On this LP, he makes the most of the similarity, crafting sunny and memorable tunes that complement the collage-like arrangements.

Some references to other eras are less direct. The third cut, “Everyday,” has no credited samples, but the track’s title, form and lyrics—“Everyday, a little bit longer / Everyway, a little bit stronger”—point to the 1957 single of the same title by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, while the title of the flowing “Whirlpool” evokes the Beach Boys, as do its honeyed harmonies. And sometimes the lines between past and present are blurry. “Edge of the Edge,” which contains a loop on loan from Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 song “Denise,” opens with clattering drums and “oooh-oooh” backing vocals from the original, and the doo-wop group seems to sing in support behind Mr. Lennox. Mr. Kember, meanwhile, sings along with the ghostly voices in a baritone register, as if he were himself one of the Rainbows, which lends a pleasingly disorienting quality.

Given the effortlessly catchy tunes, the recycled sounds from what we imagine to be less complicated times, and the album’s choir-like vocal layering, “Reset” is steeped in childlike innocence and nostalgia. But the album has a slightly tangled relationship to recording history. The samples bring the listener to the distant past, but the blocky structure of the tracks brings to mind the computer grid, where each individual element is pasted into place. One never has the illusion of a band from a bygone era playing and singing around a microphone, and the songs on “Reset” are far from seamless constructions, though that’s by design. The strobing synths that have been a trademark of Mr. Kember’s music since his days in Spacemen 3 float in and out of arrangements, bringing a dizzy and disorienting edge to the predominant sweetness.

Those who have followed Mr. Lennox’s work in and out of Animal Collective will hear this release and think immediately of the album “Person Pitch,” his 2007 Panda Bear masterpiece, which ranks among the best releases of the 2000s. That record, which mixed and matched borrowed fragments with Mr. Lennox’s original melodies, used techniques similar to this one, though it had a wider emotional palette. If this record has a weakness, it’s the obvious one derived from its initial concept—you’re never going to put this one on unless you’re in the mood for something cheerful. But if you are looking for such positivity, and are interested in how record culture and the art of sampling can be used in service of eminently listenable indie pop, “Reset” is hard to beat.

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom
Reset
DOMINO
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Reset is an album that resembles a musical toy with its mature lyrical edges covered in gobs of neon-colored Play-Doh. It largely avoids the prickliness of other pandemic releases by rubbing itself in sugary melodies and production, while repeat listens reveal it has a sharp emotional story to tell under the surface—ominous deaths occur on “Go On,” and “Edge of the Edge” alludes to strange fruit with a hidden rot and someone sick as a dog digging through trash. These multilayered and colorful songs flow from Noah Lennox, the psych-pop adventurer best known as Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, and the former Spacemen 3 alt-rocker and compendious producer Pete Kember (a.k.a. Sonic Boom).

Bells, Beach Boys melodies, Latin American percussion gourds, and monster-under-the-bed electronic rumbles charge the Peter Pan heart of this collaborative record. “Gettin’ to the Point,” the tropical opener, feels like the first jump into a warm, aquamarine body of water. Its bright acoustic guitar loop is infectious, recalling Panda Bear’s Person Pitch era. “Go On” and “Everyday” continue the summery streak and push Kember toward the mic, singing “Give it to me” like a mantra on the kaleidoscopic former track, while the latter sees him dive-bombing his airy baritone verses over sequencers, pattering percussion, and slide whistles.

Deeper into the tracklist, Lennox’s psychedelic melody on “Whirlpool” is twisted like a lime over a cold drink by Kember’s eddying production, while “Edge of the Edge” is a quintessential Panda Bear track that encapsulates the kernel of the idea Kember struck upon with his musical partner during the cabin fever days of their 2020 lockdown (it also just sounds straight up like a Beach Boys song). Kember wanted to take the ornate intros to classic tracks from the likes of Eddie Cochran, The Everly Brothers, or even The Belle Stars’ “Iko Iko,” from Rain Man, and really loop the hell out of them in one- or two-chord chunks for Reset. “Edge of the Edge” has a perfect musical intro loop for this, with its telephone-dialing beep and deep-bass doo-wop bump. It’s undeniably catchy from the jump, and works like a musical barber shop pole that can stretch skyward forever.

As the album moves along, its bright loops begin to elongate as the songs become more diffused and intricate. “In My Body” and “Danger” serve as stately and welcome comedowns from earlier musical flights of fancy, while “Livin’ in the After” is this pair’s Van Dyke Parks–like bauble, bursting with strings, rumbling synths, and galloping percussion. You admire its main melody as it glints in the sunshine and down through a canopy of Sonic Boom’s lively instrumentation. The final track on the album keeps the energy at skywriting levels: “Everything’s Been Leading to This” races along as a fitful electro-pop bookend for an album that similarly started with a sugar rush.

Reset is a pop album full of surprises. Seek it out, slip into it for a while, and play in its balmy environment again when you need a restart on your day. We all deserve some bright musical Play-Doh to blunt the sharper edges of adulthood, and the Panda Bear and Sonic Boom factory is fully functional.