Even in 2018, when streaming’s juggernaut is thought to have steamrolled every alternative path to our ears, to release a record on vinyl and vinyl alone is no big thing. There’s no accurate count of how many such discs appear every year, but in electronic music alone, it’s likely to be thousands of titles. Still, to be an artist of a certain stature and to put out a record only on wax is a kind of statement. It might be to invoke simpler times; it might be to separate the true fans from the passive ones and reward the former for their faithfulness. (It might also simply be a way of saying, “I’m not crazy about the streaming companies’ payouts.”)
In Panda Bear’s case, A Day With the Homies—a muggy, delirious five-track EP available only on vinyl—feels almost like a note scribbled on a scrap of paper and meant to be burned, buried, or swallowed. It sounds like he’s singing things that he needs to get off his chest yet doesn’t necessarily want finding their way into the digital slipstream. (In this sense, the 12” is strangely reminiscent, ironically enough, of Snapchat’s original utility as a repository of self-destructing messages.) There’s always been a dark side even to Noah Lennox’s sunniest work, but A Day With the Homies hides an especially toxic twinge beneath its sugar-coated crust.
You might not notice at first because the music is typically ebullient: smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor. “Took a sock to the socket/We got a black eye/Sucks and everything,” he chirps early in the opening “Flight,” mimicking a petulant teenager’s slouch and sly grin. Bursting with swollen bass frequencies and overdriven drum machines, it’s the Beach Boys for a world in which the rising seas have turned coastal real estate into an oil-slicked hellscape.
The background is forever threatening to swallow up the foreground: “Nod to the Folks” is framed with siren wails; “Shepard Tone,” named after a mind-bending auditory illusion, opens with what might be slowed-down helicopter rotors, sounding as disorienting and grandiose as Apocalypse Now’s Wagner-from-above as Lennox sings of deep throats, stinking bogs, and sucker punches. You wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the racing pulse, but it’s a song about endings: “Folks quit/when there’s nothing to quit on,” he intones, voicing one of the record’s major themes. “Fingers everyone,” runs the song’s endless chorus, as feedback wriggles and squirms.
The opener, too, turns out to be a conflicted sort of farewell, if not a kiss-off, with cryptic messages to his “good crew” (“Can’t be goodbye/Goodbye good crew/So I won’t say goodbye/Goodbye to you”) encoded in sticky-sweet barbershop harmony. Track two, “Part of the Math,” starts off even darker, with a serrated guitar chord slicing ominously away for what seems like forever. When Lennox finally opens his mouth, it’s to sing, “It comes out of nowhere/Like a rope/Wrapping tighter and tighter/Round the throat.” The shuffling beat is a throwback to 1990s rock/electronic fusions, like Screamadelica-era Primal Scream; Lennox’s lyrical lapses into ironic hemming and hawing suggest a character that’s part George-Michael Bluth, part Donnie Darko.
It can be hard to square the bleakness of the lyrics with the verdant excess of the sound, though its lo-fi sonics certainly match the rawness of the emotions contained within. And you might even occasionally wish Lennox would give free rein to his somber side. Is “Stop making it about your shit” a reproachful command, or a self-help mantra? Lennox has a way of making even the gloomiest pronouncements—“We’re all gonna be/Six feet in the coldest ground”—sound as giddy as a kid’s birthday party. He’s never shied from singing frankly of familial tragedy and personal travails, which will no doubt tempt some fans to parse Homies for biographical clues.
The crickets on “Flight” sound like a callback to both Animal Collective’s campfire era and the group’s Meeting of the Waters EP, from last year, which Avey Tare and Geologist wrote on their own, holed up in some Amazonian backwater. That group has always been an elastic enterprise; is Homies about stretching wings, or breaking points? No one but Lennox knows, of course. The EP opens with the sound of keys being scooped up off the table, and to join him here is to follow him on a singular flight of fancy, to enter into his own hermetic world, where dejection meets exhilaration and jumbled thoughts run free. It exists only on wax because it’s a refuge; its purposeful clutter the antithesis of everything that’s streamlined, optimized, and accessible at the click of a button. “We don’t share at all/Why are we telling them to share it all,” he sings at the close of “Flight,” and it might as well be the raison d’etre for the whole record.
