:: Track Listing

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:: Record Review

Panda Bear

Young Prayer
(Paw Tracks; 2004)

Rating: 77%
Combined Rating: 79%


Every once and a while I get totally blown away by an album. Some albums take one listen to either burrow their way into my brain or to reveal the sort of intricacy and beauty that can only be properly appreciated through hundreds of listens; some albums manage to combine both those aspects. Right now I am in the throes of Joanna Newsom’s bizarro-wonderful The Milk-Eyed Mender (read the CMG review here), but over the summer it seemed that every few albums I would throw on Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs (read the CMG review here) and just kick back.

I had never even heard of this band before, and then they came out of left-field and created a perfect hazy summer drug album. How can anyone deny the greatness of “Who Could Win a Rabbit” or the positively awe-inspiring “Winters Love?" Still, what I found especially interesting about the album was the clear focus of two musicians working in their own paradigms on a similar album. Panda Bear’s new Young Prayer clearly shows which songs belong to which member, but also serves as an impressive testament to the power of Panda Bear’s take on pop music.

The album is a sort of nine-track therapy session that Panda Bear conceived in the aftermath of his father’s death and works it into a rather beautiful song-cycle. The nameless songs have lyrics that aren't easily deciphered, but that obliquity seems fitting to an album so admirably cohesive as a whole.

Young Prayer opens with a beautiful wail of “I will” before Panda Bear sings slowly over a lightly picked guitar as the song builds to a strong climax. The second track captures the essence of the latter half of the first, with a more intense, personal delivery, whereas the beautiful piano and guitar combination of track three feels like a more polished Animal Collective work (the term "more polished" probably shouldn't even be used in relation to Animal Collective), and at the very least shows Panda Bear’s skill with more traditional pop music composition.

Track four is the longest and least accessible song on the record, coming to a furious high mid-way through and generally taking on a darker tone than any of the preceding material. Track five is a perfect, uplifting counterpoint: hundreds of hands clap along to a bass drum and Panda Bear’s multi-tracked chanting. Track six is a return to much of the aesthetic of the first track, but with a distinctly more melancholy feel.

The seventh track is absolutely swamped in reverb—Panda Bear sounds as though he recorded this from another room. The stark return in the crisp eighth track is startling, but the track is noteworthy in its own right. Easily the most gripping on the album, the song is absolutely wrought with sadness. Track nine combines elements from all the songs—the circular piano line and Panda Bear’s wails crowd the first section, but as the production is pulled back and the track is stripped to just the piano, you get a sense of the simple beauty of the song.

If you enjoyed the quieter, more ethereal songs from Sung Tongs (“The Softest Voice” and the epic “Visiting Friends” immediately come to mind), then Young Prayer may be quite to your liking. The album manages to achieve that perfect pop effect: the ability to deal with enormously sad and personal subjects within the medium of happy, upbeat music. Panda Bear never makes a point of it, but melancholia clearly pervades this album. It’s his ability to write beautiful, engaging music about it that makes Young Prayer the fascinating listen that it is. Peter Hepburn :: 6 October 2004 |