When Animal Collective started playing their formative shows in New York around 2000, Panda Bear was the band's drummer — and not merely a drummer, but a savage drummer, one known for his ability to make a mad racket with lots of metronomic tapping and slapdash syncopation. Little in his work in the past few years has offered evidence of this past, but knowledge of Panda Bear's roots as a percussionist sheds a bit of light on both his increasingly commanding songs for Animal Collective and, especially, his solo work. With 2007's Person Pitch, his own reputation threatened to overshadow that of his band, so rich were that album's patterns — of repeating samples, bleary vocal moans and melodies both melancholy and bright. There is a crosscutting, almost quilt-like, aspect to his songs that make them unusually approachable for music so abstract.

Tomboy both tightens and expands that percussionist's sense of pattern-recognition, to equally mesmerizing and even-more accessible effect. The results, as ever, evoke psychedelic notions of church, the Beach Boys and someone humming in the shower oblivious to the idea that there's someone just outside the curtain, listening. "You Can Count on Me" starts the album off with… read more »