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Panda Bear: Sinister Grift review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
Noah Lennox’s powerful and adventurous album has plenty of playlistable psych-pop, but then turns introspective: it’s a striking emotional arc
But then, just after Sinister Grift’s midpoint, the album begins to shift: the tempo dramatically drops, the vague hint of melancholy that underpins even Animal Collective’s most euphoric moments – the slight scent of sadness that you catch during My Girls’ lovestruck paean to fatherhood, or Fireworks’ giddy chaos – seems to gradually overwhelm its sound. Based around a repeated guitar figure that occasionally turns discordant, or threatens to break down amid splashes of synthesised white noise, it carries something of the fragile, halting quality of Skip Spence’s Oar or Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, and like those albums it has the uncomfortable feel of overhearing something rather than listening to it. This is a bold, risky way to sequence an album: listeners entranced by the pop smarts of its opening tracks may give up and turn Sinister Grift off as the whole thing dissolves into mournful, introspective and abstract territory, returning only to cherry-pick the more user-friendly moments for a playlist.
Or read this on The Guardian