The music on Person Pitch sounds nothing like proper dance music, but the basic structure-- the use of dynamics, and above all, the sense of repetition-- draws heavily from that context. Which is particularly interesting considering what else is going on.  Full text...

Person Pitch, for all intents and purposes, is Panda Bear’s coming-out party as a solo artist and as a performer, period. From top to bottom, it’s the most moving, complex, all-there release to come from the Animal Collective camp.  Full text...

It’s all masterful: the vocation that must have gone into making this is audible, but it all sounds so effortless.  Full text...

Loose, rythmic guitar strums and ambient tones have been traded for tight polyrhythms, samples, loops, and commanding, melodic vocals.   Full text...

If limited to a single two-word phrase to describe Person Pitch, I'd refer to Panda Bear's third album as "lusciously indistinct." A color-drained bleached-as-eff pair of jeans from 1985; a coquettish albina adorned in pastels; a bright and vibrant world viewed from a separate dimension, liable to fade at any given moment.  Full text...

It's not the greatest musical achievement of this young century, either. It could be among the best albums released this year when the dust settles, but even that's jumping the gun.  Full text...

It’s a record that I underrated, and one that I have come back to many times in the last three years.   Full text...

It’s easily the gentlest, brightest record to be associated with the Animal Collective.  Full text...

If you know and liked “Young Prayer,” you will likely enjoy “Person Pitch” although it is nowhere near as somnambulistic. Rather, it is positively happy. If anything, it is closer to Mr. Bear’s work in Animal Collective, though not quite as spastic. “Person Pitch” is a strange amalgam of The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and Paul Simon’s “Graceland” filtered through a sampler. This may sound like an uncomfortable mix, but the first four songs are incredibly good – musically unique with melodies sharp enough to cut a penny.   Full text...

It is hard to listen to Person Pitch without forgetting that these are the sounds of one man alone in his room, a quality that naturally adheres to all cloistered auteurs, from Todd Rundgren and Skip Spence to Lou Barlow and Ariel Pink.  Full text...

Fans of Animal Collective rejoice! The collective's drummer/sound maker's new CD is a treat for the ears, combining warped Beach Boys pop with lush effects and beautiful melodies.  Full text...

While his last solo mission, 2004's Young Prayer, is a short suite of baroque jots and freehand scribbles, lacking in titles and largely wordless - an immediate mould of malformed ache - this new disc feels slowly and carefully assembled. It bears seven compositions, two of which clock in at over 12 sublime minutes. Lennox often relies on the same longform, time-release abstraction of his Jane side-project, only this time they're disciplined by pop structures (however disintegrated they may be).  Full text...

Person Pitch traffics heavily in the two elements that Lennox has always brought to the table: sticky-sweet vocal melody and meticulously-crafted otherness.   Full text...