Music Review: Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper marks Noah Lennox’s fifth album as Panda Bear (produced by Domino Recording Company and released on Jan. 9 of this year). The record has, deservingly, been met with significant critical acclaim and demonstrates Lennox’s mature, polished musical talent.

The sound he achieves on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is challenging to categorize, but lands somewhere in the territory of neo-psychedelic electronic funk, characterized by oscillating fuzz and groovy loops in which you can get completely lost. With soaring ballads and thick, entrancing beats, Panda Bear shows us how to tune out extraneous distractions and exist thoroughly in the present.

“Mr. Noah” and “Boys Latin,” the two extended plays he released at the end of 2014, stand out as instantly addictive head-boppers. With gripping theatricality and a disturbing Halloween-style ghostly hook, “Mr. Noah” evokes a strobe-lit graveyard that gives the sense that Lennox has chosen the album title well. “Boys Latin” is nothing short of transportive, drawing off the same ghoulish background as “Mr. Noah” but elevating and building upon itself to crescendo into Panda Bear’s signature complex rhythmic style.

The album’s opening track, “Sequential Circuits,” is a dark electronic cannon that fills up your head and seeps into your bones with its phantasmagoric gravitas. The emotional, dark nature of the record as a whole is immediately apparent, but Lennox’s method of coping with challenges he faces—middle age, mourning his father’s death, caring for young children—is bold and playful.

Lyrically, the songs are bleak, contemplative and impersonal enough that they allow the listener to connect on a fundamental human level. This is evident in “Come to Your Senses,” which asks over and over again, “Are you mad?” and answering “yeah, I’m mad” with a shadowy, trippy backdrop. Respite comes in tranquil serenades like “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lonely Wanderer,” which are both punctuated with some truly beautiful instrumental sequences and show how Panda Bear has a complexity and depth far beyond EDM club noise. “Selfish Gene” is a standout deep track in which Panda Bear picks up the tempo with a solemn reflection on parenthood: “When it comes to fill those spaces/only you can fill those spaces.”

This album is dark, relatable and powerful, crossing gritty post-punk electronics with rhythmic funk and existential lyricism. If it falls short anywhere, it is that the tracks tend to bleed together into an inseparable mass of sound, but that effect may be what Panda Bear was aiming for anyway; the album feels more like a stream of consciousness than a progression of separate tracks. Lennox is an accomplished artist with a wholly unique sound, and with Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper he has pulled off the impressive feat of continuing to evolve as a musician while staying true to his origins.