Album Review: A Day With The Homies [EP] by Panda Bear

A decade ago, Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) was having a "moment." His 2007 album, Person Pitch, brilliantly blended hypnotic loops with luminescent Beach Boys-style harmonies, and his 2009 Animal Collective contribution, "My Girls," was a bona fide indie hit that brought the group to the peak of their commercial viability.   Since then, Panda's work has gotten a little darker and more cryptic, and while his output has been solid, he's no longer capturing the zeitgeist. That's not going to change with A Day with the Homies — after all ….

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The exclusivity of a vinyl-only release carries with it a certain temptation. It gives wax heads another reason to visit whatever record shop remains in their town on Saturday afternoon and it incentivises all others straddling the fence and tired of feeling left out to get a turntable and join in. It's no secret that Animal Collective belongs to the former of the two groups of people.

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Issued exclusively on vinyl near the beginning of 2018, A Day with the Homies is an EP containing five playful yet low-key tracks by Panda Bear (Animal Collective member Noah Lennox). While 2015's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper contained some of his most direct songwriting yet, Homies seems content to meander, never settling on anything resembling proper song structure. Even though the EP is devoid of conventional hooks, Lennox still has a highly tuneful, chipper way of singing, and if there were more repetition to these songs, they would be earworms.

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Even in 2018, when streaming’s juggernaut is thought to have steamrolled every alternative path to our ears, to release a record on vinyl and vinyl alone is no big thing. There’s no accurate count of how many such discs appear every year, but in electronic music alone, it’s likely to be thousands of titles. Still, to be an artist of a certain stature and to put out a record only on wax is a kind of statement.

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