After releasing an universally acclaimed album, in this case his sophomore album Person Pitch, I would imagine that Noah Lennox was probably a little daunted by this sudden fame and his emergence as the most widely known member in his full-time band Animal Collective. Not that he wasn't known by his fans, he had already released a tremendous debut solo album and had been going strong with Animal Collective for years before that. But with the release and reception of Person Pitch, his notoriety rose exponentially. And with expectations riding high on the back of that album, the prospect of releasing a follow-up was problematic at best. How do you stretch yourself creatively as an artist without alienating those fans which just want you to release another Person Pitch? As evidenced successfully on his newest record, Lennox takes the psych jams and synth washes of that album and condenses it, refines it. He's made a pop record. Don't get me wrong, all the subtle touches and overtly odd arrangements and twisting vocal melodies are intact, but this is a pop record.
Lennox has taken the sprawl that made Person Pitch so memorably labyrinthine and dense and pressed it tightly together in his hands to create Tomboy, an album filled with the usual Lennox musical hallmarks but one that plays out differently from his other releases. This album feels spare in a way that has nothing to do with the instrumentation. You get the feeling that Lennox came at this record at a run, determined to craft an album of emotional immediacy and deceptive pop sheen, much like his musical heroes Brian Wilson and Arthur Russell had done. "You Can Count On Me" opens the album with a simple refrain repeated until it becomes a mantra for Lennox. A call of support surrounded by the slight distortion and buried feeling of his vocals, while synths and a simple beat guide the song along to its natural conclusion. "Slow Motion" and "Last Night At The Jetty" both showcase Lennoxs' preternatural ability to wring hummable, slithering melodies from beneath the sometimes dense layers of drones and synths which ride across these tracks. This ability is all the more impressive as the album successfully and creatively filters his influences through his own musical aesthetic producing something which steps out of time and resists the easy categorization of his peers. With Tomboy, Noah Lennox has produced an album of sparkling pop clarity, while never comproimising his own dense musical preferences. And if you're dissapointed with Lennox for not releasing another Person Pitch, then fuck you. He's given us Tomboy and that's enough.
Tracklisting:
01. You Can Count on Me
02. Tomboy
03. Slow Motion
04. Surfers Hymn
05. Last Night at the Jetty (listen to the mp3 below)
06. Drone
07. Alsatian Darn
08. Scheherezade
09. Friendship Bracelet
10. Afterburner
11. Benfica
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