Panda Bear - Sinister Grift Review
Noah Lennox provides a beautiful take on poetic shadow work, finding acceptance in both tragedy and growth.
Panda Bear released his eighth solo album, Sinister Grift, which seamlessly creates a buoyant listen to weighted lyricism. It’s a revitalizing musical experience that prods at hollowing contemplations without severing its allegiance to light/airy sonics. Lennox’s work has stretched far and wide, meeting friends along the way like Solange, Daft Punk, and Dean Blunt. The Animal Collective member however seems to have released a home-anchoring project, one that searches within a 46 year old Lennox psyche. Sinister Grift doesn’t bid Panda Bear sonic conventions adieu, but modernly reconfigures them. There’s a warming, sacred feeling within Sinister Grift, all thanks to Lennox’s ability to marry pensive poetics with rippling musical movement.
“Anywhere but Here” commences with a trudging guitar and haunting metronome, accompanied by a Beach Boys-esque Panda Bear verse that’s clad in painfully optimistic verbiage. Cutting Lennox’s introduction with a butter knife is the sweet Nadja Lennox detour, spoken in Portuguese tongue. This track floats through its four minute and 40 second space in the project, utilizing every second by breaching the surface of suffering and self-confrontation, while creating a realm that harbors a gentle beach-borne tune.
Lennox mentions that he’s “An actor in a fantasy/ a factor in a fallacy” in the surf-rock track “50mg”. Panda Bear adopts a lens of exploration that surrounds his ponderings with acceptance and immediacy, laced with synth sonics that harken back to Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky”. Lennox kneads similar concepts into tracks “Ends Meet” and “Just as Well”, two tracks that are cut from a sun-bleached nihilistic cloth. It’s admirable to see a middle-aged Panda Bear wearing the verses “Got nothing left to lose” and “What else can I do?/ They’ve got a spot to bury you” so proudly. There’s a colorful, and arguably fruitful perspective used in Sinister Grift when viewing death, mistakes, and suffering, partially accounted for by the open-road feelings of Lennox’s bouncy indie-rock style.
“Ferry Lady”, ushered in as one of Sinister Grift’s lead singles, adopts the melting quality of free-form thought via breezy psychedelia sonics. It’s easy to get lost in the track with its pulsating beat and oil-slicked “lost in thought” refrain. Again, Lennox seems to be uplifting troubling concepts and thought patterns that would otherwise become a hindrance to enlightenment. He’s actively proving that there is some sort of sentiment to the “sinister”.
Track eight, “Left in the Cold”, begins to outline the casted shadow of Noah Lennox’s figure. The album explores both light and dark, yet the darkness isn’t doesn’t truly penetrate until tracks eight and nine. “Left in the Cold” is adorned with echoing vocals, a drowning guitar strum, and ambient synths. This track is one of the first moments where the weight of Sinister Grift’s subject matter is all-consuming. Immediately tagging along is track “Elegy for Noah Lou”, which dabbles in the instrument-play of Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper with its distorted technical intro. Lennox didn’t lead with a fearful foot in this project; All of the mental/metaphorical demons were exposed, and done so with a light pen. Track nine does this same work, but acknowledges grief (lyrically and sonically), and recognizes that reveling in it without solution, is also permissible. Lennox writes the lament with a longing for security that touches your ears with each and every painfully elongated vocal.`
The reprise, “Defense” featuring Cindy Lee is the hopeful outro that a deeply introspective album needs in order to exit lightly. Between the “Here I come” and “Tryin’ to reset/ What’s inside my mind”, listeners are left to feel uplifted, and ready to be challenged. The quilted canvas of Sinister Grift has optimism laced within the thread work, yet each block performs a beautiful juxtaposition of the admittance to suffering. Sinister Grift is Panda Bear’s musical shadow work, yet it treads so lightly you can’t hear the weighted footsteps of his nihilist contemplation.