It was a sunny Sunday afternoon at an artsy exhibition space in Queens, New York, and Panda Bear had a dimly lit wigwam full of people pondering their own mortality.
The prompt wasn’t particularly subtle. Noah Lennox, the Animal Collective frontman, spent nearly all his 75-minute long set – streamed on the internet as part of the Boiler Room sessions – with his eyes closed. Overhead a cowled skeleton (a nod to his fifth studio album, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper), projected on the curved ceiling of the Moma PS1 dome, cradled and rocked a stuffed panda bear doll before shredding it to pieces. The same ghostly, red-sequin-clad visage beckoned to the crowd: you’re next. Message received.
It made for a show that was as much a visual as a musical event, with experimental film courtesy of artist Danny Perez, the director behind ODDSAC, Animal Collective’s 2010 visual album. It seemed to serve Lennox, an “intensely” private person, well, evidenced by his desire to fade into the chaotic backdrop while performing songs that are deeply personal.
Lennox played an immersive, nonstop set stacked with offerings from his latest LP, which has been called his most accessible to date. After appearing onstage to little fanfare and pausing to ready his elaborate synthesizer setup, Lennox set to work. He eased into the album’s opening track, Sequential Circuits, a flowing song that could be the soundtrack to your personal journey down the River Styx.
That’s not to say it wasn’t fun. As we were carried away by a sea of pulsing strobe lights and flowing technicolor for Crosswords, the crowd was transfixed. Panda Bear seamlessly transitioned through the plunking Boys Latin and Faces in the Crowd.
It’s easy to lose the disarmingly lovely quality of Lennox’s voice when it’s half-obscured by layer upon layer of looping sound on a studio album, but he shines in a live setting. He brought a boyish, melodious howl to Tomboy highlight You Can Count on Me and a stunning, detached fragility to Come to Your Senses, with the repeated entreatment: “Are you mad?” In this surreal space, it begins to almost make sense that there are naked alien-like beings rolling and dancing around each other projected all around us.
But the delicate centerpiece Tropic of Cancer was the real gem – showcasing Lennox finding peace after a loved one succumbs to illness in a sprawling, unabashedly pretty ebb and flow with the sound of harps.
All the while, the crowd bobbed appreciatively and was overjoyed at the chance to cheer Lennox to an encore when finally given a break in the action. He reappeared quietly, taking a moment to ready himself before launching into Mr Noah, the lead single from Grim Reaper, and an extended version of album standout Lonely Wanderer.
We were treated to visions of otherworldly demons beaming as they spewed vomit, coupled with a booming, unintelligible voice. It’s unclear whether it was a message from our alien overlords or a voice in the darkness urging us deeper down the rabbit hole, but the ambiguousness works for Panda Bear, who disappears as the sight and sounds of ocean swells envelopes the room. The audience is cast into soothing darkness, but the beautiful ambience of the set lingers on like a benign ghost.
