Album of the Week: Sonic Boom and Panda Bear reach new heights with ‘Reset’
Today, Sonic Boom and Panda Bear unveil their new collaborative effort, Reset. The album, released via Domino, has been a long time coming. Although it is their first joint album, Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Pete Kember (Sonic Boom) are no strangers to one another’s music. Kember aided Lennox with his two solo records, 2011’s Tomboy and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. Now, they’ve joined forces to create what has to be one of the most mind-bending releases of the summer.
Fans were recently treated to a preview of Reset in the form of ‘Go On’, the album’s lead single. Like the opening track ‘Getting to The Point’, ‘Go On’ is a 1960s pop hit built on the ever-shifting foundations of acid house. Much of the album was inspired by Sonic Boom’s collection of the 1950s and ’60s American doo-wop records and rock ‘n’ roll LPs.
No matter how spacey, each of Reset’s nine tracks indicates its vintage origins. ‘Go On’, for example, features a sample of The Trogg’s 1967 hit ‘Give It To Me’, while ‘Livin’ In The After’ makes excellent use of a sweeping ’60s string sample, which succeeds in evoking the dry heat of a provincial Mediterranean town on carnival day.
The first quarter of Reset exists within a cramped labyrinth of its own devising. However, with ‘Everyday’, the shutters come up, and the sun comes pouring in. This strong summer flavour might have something to do with the fact that both Sonic Boom and Panda Bear have been living in Portugal for the last six years. In fact, Kember decided to leave England behind partly to be closer to Panda Bear, to whom he’d been introduced via MySpace a decade earlier.
The sun dips away for a while with the arrival of ‘It’s In My Body’, introducing Boom and Bear’s introspective and subtly gothic lyrics, which provide an unnerving contrast to the song’s mellow sonic palette. For the next seven minutes or so, Reset sounds like the inner monologues of two shoe-gazing musos being fed through a flux capacitor.
It’s all bubbles and waves here, yet something lurks beneath the foam. Things emerge all the brighter with album-highlight ‘Danger’ though, which initially offers respite from the chirps and bleeps that have defined the bulk of Reset. Here, Lennox and Kember’s melodies and their talent for crafting mesmerising acoustic textures are showcased to magnificent effect – raising an already jaw-dropping album to new heights.
The whole way through Reset, it’s been clear that Boom and Panda have been having one hell of a good time. It only makes sense for them to finish on a euphoric high. Motoric arpeggios cut a line through the duo’s call-and-response dialogue, pushing the track towards greater and greater complexity until, at last, the bubble seems to burst, and we’re left with a shimmer of fading synths – as though the lights have just come up at the end of a long night of dancing.
As you wipe the sweat from your brow and detach yourself from the clammy randomer you’ve been dancing with for the last half an hour, you smile at the thought that you’ve been well and truly reset.
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