We tend to think of creative influence as a one-way exchange from an older generation to a younger one. But that formulation is not only simplistic; it’s often flat-out wrong. Occasionally, a veteran musician vibes so hard with a younger peer that they seem to merge aesthetically, philosophically, even molecularly, sharing an artistic evolution over many years. In the remarkable case of Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, and Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, the two have melded so completely that they sometimes seem like a single musical mind.
At first, Panda Bear was Sonic Boom’s acolyte. Kember’s sludgy, druggy band Spacemen 3, pioneers of late-’80s space rock, were a beacon when Lennox’s Animal Collective helped steer psychedelia into the 21st century. Panda Bear namechecked Spacemen 3 in the liner notes of his 2007 solo breakout, Person Pitch, which deftly employed electronic techniques to make earthy, acoustic-aping sounds. When the two artists met for the first time, it was because Kember—who has a similar knack for coaxing warmth from chilly waveforms—sent Lennox a fan note on MySpace.
Sitting in the producer’s chair, Kember introduced gurgling drones to Panda Bear’s next two records, 2011’s Tomboy and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and Lennox lent his high tenor to 2020’s All Things Being Equal, Sonic Boom’s first solo LP in 30 years. A denizen of Lisbon since 2004, Lennox was among the reasons Kember moved to Portugal in 2016. In interviews, they speak about each other frequently and fondly, as amped about their friendship as their work together. The duo’s gradual stylistic convergence highlights an unusual collaborative mode: Dissolving hierarchy, they cohabitate common ground as artistic siblings.
Thanks to the sample-based compositions that they have mutually matured into making, this breakdown of influencer and influenced, master and admirer, seems particularly apt. On Reset, the first album to give both men equal billing, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are students of the 1960s, spinning samples from Kennedy-era acts like Randy & the Rainbows and Eddie Cochran into layered, harmony-heavy arrangements that evoke the decade’s later years. The concept may feel familiar, particularly for Lennox. It might also seem heady and academic, a map of musical strains throughout history. But like the house mixes that both musicians love (which neither have ever, exactly, produced), Reset is simple, ecstatic, as elegant as a math formula. The most pleasurable release of either of their careers, the record aims consistently for gossamer melodies and propulsive rhythms and hits its targets again and again.
Essential to their take on the ’60s are subsequent decades’ interpretations and revivals of that pivotal era. Reset’s generous spirit encompasses the Elephant 6 collective and Cornershop’s gleeful ripostes to the skeptical ’90s; the radical inclusivity of the Avalanches and Daft Punk; and of course some of the echoey sweetness that both Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear found in the Beach Boys in the late ’00s. The record is a paean to the many eras of music lovers who have sifted through their stacks of vinyl and heard something surprising in sounds that have reverberated so long in the culture they threatened to turn trite. Kember and Lennox’s gear reflects this pan-generational perspective—a vintage harmonizer introduced in the mid ’70s, a lo-fi synth designed in the ’80s, the portable OP-1 that has become ubiquitous in the last decade. They incorporate analog filters, bass, güiro, sleigh bells, a dialed phone, and abundantly sampled acoustic guitar, which harkens back to the sunniness of Person Pitch highlight “Bros.” Reset is easily the most natural and intuitive Lennox has sounded since then.
However symbiotic he and Kember have become, the record’s surface is pure Panda Bear. He repeats “drown” on the terrific “Whirlpool” like some teen idol of the doo-wop era. The harmonically delectable “In My Body” builds to a descending refrain that numbers among the most gorgeous vocal hooks in a career brimming with them: “Stuck up on a branch,” Lennox sighs, “And I can’t get down.” This song initiates the album’s unexpectedly chilled-out core, a suite of tracks—“In My Body,” “Whirlpool,” and “Danger”—that will remind many of the slower, more relaxed songs on the back half of the epochal Merriweather Post Pavilion. Reset invites these lofty comparisons, and pulses with life both because and in spite of them.
The lyrics are opaque, impressionistic, and hallucinogenic. More than the content of his words, we notice the way Lennox wraps his mouth around them—“You take a swig and then you take a crack,” he chatters on the chipper, even humorous “Edge of the Edge,” emphasizing crack to coax out its tactile vowel—as well as the repetitive mantras that evoke Sonic Boom’s recent solo albums. “Give it to me,” chants Kember on “Go On” with the incidental charm of a kid messing around with a tape recorder for the first time. The irony is that the lyric is the title of a Troggs single he sampled for the song’s backbone: The demanding boy is just psyched about his record collection.
Reset slips from back-to-basics, handclap-laden pop to new peaks in the familiar range of Lennox’s music. It makes us wonder: Should we be bothered that the record’s best moments can feel cherry-picked from Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion? Those albums were both sprawling and deceptively formless, oozing out of their constraints like different varieties of colored foam. Reset is refined, concentrated, a focused burst of reggae-esque exultation. If it seems to lack ambition, Kember and Lennox compensate by carving away ideas in order to arrive at a sharp point. This tactic recalls a surprising touchstone: Is This It. But while the Strokes winnowed the rock and post-punk of their forebears, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom chisel at a vernacular shaped by their own prior work.
Their resilient positivity summons mid-’60s Jamaican ska and rocksteady, a connection the artists have made in interviews, although sonically, Reset locates us firmly in the post-Brian Wilson terrain that Animal Collective, Panda Bear, and Sonic Boom have tilled and cultivated. At points, such as the closer “Everything’s Been Leading to This,” we’re mesmerized into a techno-like trance, yet rather than harnessing the genre’s sound, Reset taps into dance music’s spirit, its sanguinity in spite of an unsympathetic society: “Well times are tough/And the draw is raw,” we hear on the final track, one of the few instances when an embedded sense of politics steps to the fore. “We’re skiddin’ through/A closin’ door.”
Reset addresses our own troubled zeitgeist by avoiding the ambient dread, blithe critique, and seething anger that often characterize records we consider to be topical today. “One dude’s sweat/Is another’s balm,” Panda Bear sings on “Go On.” He may be condemning an exploitative capitalist system, but Lennox is also describing his music’s uplift and the hard labor required to make such a salve. Less palliative than corrective, Reset is a dose of human lightness in the drudgery of the now. Conventional wisdom says that only younger performers have the unspoiled optimism and energy necessary to make such enthusiasm believable—the ardent songs Reset samples, after all, were sung by teens or twenty-somethings. But Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls.
