Panda Bear – Person Pitch

Since it’s approaching the Reading/Leeds festival weekend very quickly, I thought I’d take this opportunity to briefly recommend a different kind of album. You know when you’ve had a great night, you’ve stumbled back to your house/flat/tent/hovel/tarpaulin with your friends and you feel tired but you don’t feel like going to sleep? Moments like this are made for Person Pitch.

Animal Collective singer and instrumentalist Noah Lennox has crafted what can accurately be described as Brian Wilson’s most fondly remembered mushroom trip. Simple, child-like melodies, trippy found-sounds, a generous amount of echo and reverb and some bizarre twists and turns all make up a genuinely glorious dreamscape. The twelve-minute epic (which was, unbelievably, released as a single) ‘Bro’s’ grows out of gentle lapping-wave guitars, adding distant Beach Boys harmonies before eventually growing into a sugar-rush-addled party. ‘I’m Not’ is hypnotic pop seemingly built entirely from celestial sighs, while the 2-minute closer ‘Ponytail’ feels like a nursery rhyme sung from the bottom of the sea. It’s an album that you can really dig into in that you really want to explore its every niche since there’s just so many.

There’s a chance that it might take a couple of listens to get into this record, but once it hits, boy does it hit. Eventually you’ll be lying back on the floor bobbing your head getting totally and blissfully lost in what is at once a warm, challenging, confusing, engrossing, soothing and stimulating escapist dream on which weak moments are left out in the cold. If you’re in a tent and you bring some form of music player with you, make sure you’re armed with this gem. I sure as hell will be when the time comes.

[4.5/5.0]

Charlie Simpson – Young Pilgrim

Dear me, who’s this man holding an acoustic guitar? It’s not… it is! It’s the one with the eyebrows from Busted! And it’s not a disaster? Pull the other one! Finding artistic recognition when you were once in (what was effectively) a boy band (with guitars) is like trying to become a member of Amnesty International after serving the sentence given to you at Nuremberg: no matter how good your intentions are now, people are unlikely to listen to you because of that enormous blot on your past. If there is a right way to shed your past though, Charlie Simpson seems to be onto a winner. The last time we saw Matt Willis, he was chewing through a kangaroo anus on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here whereas Busted’s “other one” James Bourne has sunk out of the public eye completely (though probably not out of choice). Simpson though is still hanging in there and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need to resort to an emergency chorus of ‘Year 3000′ to get the crowd going.

The fact is that this new solo LP, the slightly folky pop-rock set Young Pilgrim is really rather good in many places. One of these “many places” is the steel-guitar and harmonica assisted ‘Farmer and His Gun’ which just about gets the balance right: it sounds like Simpson really means what he says, but it also sounds like he and his band are having fun. While the record is a little over-produced and the wrong side of cliché occasionally, it gets it right a surprising amount of the time. ‘If I Lose It’ in particular is a slight disappointment since producer Danton Supple (whose name makes him sound like a porn star with a particular niche talent) has added too many frills to the point that it sounds a bit too close to Radio One, but it’s a credit to Simpson’s song-writing and his empathetic delivery that you can tell that the songs will work when the garnish is trimmed away. It works best when it’s at its most bare, both sonically and emotionally (but banjos and fiddles help). ‘I Need A Friend Tonight’ shows that he’s not always the best lyricist (“I’m so sick and tired of all this bullshit politics”) but when he lays himself on the line in the “Oh my lord I need a friend tonight” chorus, it would make Bon Iver proud.

I hope people can forgive Simpson for ‘What I Go To School For’ since, as he’s shown, he’s worth far more than that. This isn’t the best album of its type out there, but there are some genuinely good songs on here that deserve your time. Probably the highlight for me is ‘All At Once’ achieves the modern folk anthem sound without trying too hard.

[3.0/5.0]

Download: ‘All At Once’, ‘I Need A Friend Tonight’, ‘Farmer and his Gun’.