By Bruno Bridger, Arts Editor
The recent passing of musical genius Brian Wilson was not only an immense, and immeasurable loss for the music world, but further, it immediately provoked retrospective appreciation from music journalists who tasked themselves with re-affirming the widespread and equally prolific influence of Wilson upon today’s musicians.
In my humble opinion, no musician carries the mantle of Wilson and the Beach Boys cand-soaked melodies and oceanic guitars, better than Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox, best known as Panda Bear.
In fact, Lennox’s new album, Sinister Grift, which he played in full on Thursday in the Bristol Beacon’s Lantern Hall, is perhaps Lennox at his most Wilson-esque.
While earlier Panda Bear classics, most notably 2008’s Person Pitch, utilised heavy-sampling and dub mixing to affirm the project's psychedelic qualities.
His new album is by contrast a remarkably stripped album for Lennox, which draws from vintage surf-rock and jangle pop sounds with only a smattering of dub delay or contorted snippets of background noise.
Album highpoints such as ‘Ends Meet’, when performed live, almost uncannily re-call some strange reimagining of Smile-Era Beach Boys.
Despite this, it would be unfair to understand Sinister Grift as some exercise of vintage, retro pop fetishism.
In fact, Lennox is contrastingly able to expertly display his contemporary pop-kudos and knowledge of the emergent underground, with his cover of the Crying Nudes (A Dean Blunt affiliated project) ‘Greaser’, a song that he has remixed and integrated into his setlists rather beautifully on this tour.
Alongside his work with Dean Blunt, which has arguably brought Lennox a new-found Gen Z fanbase, after the markedly millennial fanfare surrounding Person Pitch, Lennox’s performance in the Lantern Hall, which hosted a crowd of fresh-faced onlookers and 6 Music Dads, expertly displayed the merging styles and highpoints of Panda Bear’s discography, which flits between vintage melodies and pop's startling future.
Featured Image: Benji ChapmanHave you listened to Sinister Grift?
