Panda Bear & Sonic Boom - Reset

Album Review

Aug 21

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom

Reset

Reset forces us to recognize the value in our own perspectives and experience as we close the door on the past, building a new future on a foundation of optimism and limitless potential.

The first collaboration between artists Panda Bear + Sonic Boom, "Reset" (Domino – Beat Happening, Buzzcocks, Wet Leg) fosters a comfortable soundscape brimming with samples of sixties psych pop both familiar and surprising.

At first listen, Reset recalls late nights in the back seat of my parent's car on road trips, serenaded by new-to-me songs that defined their generation but not mine.

As the first jangly acoustic notes of "Getting To The Point" mix with sweeping electronica, the spirit of Reset is evident, throwing the listener down a rabbit hole of nostalgia with a distinct cocktail party effect.

You know you know the song. The opening chord progression jumps out in familiarity, creating a cascading series of semi-conscious memories, shuffling the original song's lyrics to the front of your mind before Panda Bear's voice reminds you of where (and when) you are.

Ultimately, Reset builds emotionality through memory and rhetorical connection while subverting our expectations in just over half an hour.

But that's not to say Panda Bear + Sonic Boom's works aren't original. Instead, like King Tubby's sonic experiments during the era of invention of Dub in post-colonial Jamaica, Reset reifies the historical impact of psychedelia on pop and electronic music by explicitly connecting the links between the genres, imbuing them with legitimacy as they're presented to a fresh audience.

Reset provides a unique insight into the influences of the two artists' efforts, despite their disparate generational backgrounds. Bear and Boom, both important, beloved artists in their own right, root their collaborations in the aural spaces of overlapping musical interest and the corporeal realm as ex-pats with a mutual love for life in Portugal.

Notably, the work the duo has collaborated on allows the listener a moment of reflection to consider their own perspective and that of the artists and their place in musical history.

While not a "miss," more traditional listeners might feel alienated by the use of sampling on Reset to construct vibrant, saccharine songs that refocus and recenter our attention on what's interesting about old sounds.

Beyond simply expanding our pop culture continuum, Panda Bear + Sonic Boom innovate with the very artifacts that created it in the first place. Like an alternate reality Beach Boys, Reset's compositions in sonic pastiche and collage generate a document that reveres modernity and technology as much as it does its roots.

Some cuts, like "Go On" or "Edge of the Edge," feel like equal parts Doo-Wop and Disneyland Electrical Light Parade, reflecting the overpromise of the 20th century and the efforts of the 21st to answer them.

Maybe all that complicates something simply meant to sound good, but somehow I doubt it. Panda Bear + Sonic Bear are both accomplished, dynamic artists with decades of songwriting and performing experience behind them.

They know precisely what they're doing. And though the album never really hits the crucial timelessness of its influences, that's the point. The album forces us to recognize the value in our own perspectives and experience as we close the door on the past, building a new future on a foundation of optimism and limitless potential.