Panda Bear and Sonic Boom rekindle their fruitful collaboration with their second full-length album as equal partners, following up 2022’s brilliant Reset with new album A ? Of When, released this week. Like its predecessor, A ? Of When is largely built around loops and samples, over which both Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Pete Kember (Sonic Boom) contribute vocals to irresistibly melodic, perfectly formed symphonies of subtly psychedelic pop.
As we’ve become accustomed to, Lennox’s honeyed harmonies often recall the peak 1960s sunshine pop of The Beach Boys, and throughout A ? Of When, the surf is indeed up. On this exquisite new record though, it isn’t simply the vocals that recall Brian Wilson’s finest hour. Much of the instrumentation employed here also playfully leans towards the experimental, at least within the confines of pop, rendering the whole thing delightfully off-kilter. A woozy, trippy sojourn frequently reminiscent of Wilson’s fabled SMiLE project.
The excellent “Revive him” perfectly evidences this approach, it's a pop gem that unfurls at its own rolling pace, conjuring a sense of Americana that is not quite graspable, an exotica that perhaps exists only in the imagination. Like Wilson’s celebrated “teenage pocket symphonies”, “Revive him” possesses something approaching the spiritual in its insistence on projecting joy, a quality touched on even more explicitly later through the sweet, hymn-like “Pray to you”.
The Kember-led “Something like dreaming” is another immediate highlight, more pastoral than the effervescent tracks that precede it, but no less psychedelic in its peaceful, hallucinatory pondering. As the plaintive, unhurried rhythm, evaporating synth textures and phased effects envelop the listener, the track recalls some of Kember’s very best work with his influential band Spacemen 3, particularly their landmark Playing With Fire LP. Kember’s shimmering, jagged, Suicide-esque synths make a welcome reappearance on “Somethin’ that lasts”, though here they are intriguingly paired with the lonesome strains of pedal steel.
The title track, too, seems to draw from Spacemen 3’s foundational sound, though Lennox adds significant rays of sunshine. Pulsing organ drones are joined by a playful, upbeat rhythm and pan flute accompaniment, while the ringing of police sirens is interspersed as wonderfully hare-brained musical decoration. It is a move that places the track firmly within the lineage of the 1960s outsider psych-experimentalists, of which Lennox and Kember are both clearly such devotees.
The ghostly, spectral “Like a moth to a flame” provides the album’s most hypnagogic moment. In a similar vein to Cindy Lee, it recalls the early 1960s pop of teen idols and girl groups, dialling up the dreaminess while amplifying the bittersweet emotional tug of its inspirations.
