This blog can be a pain in the ass every now and then. I’ve found myself keeping up to date with current indie events less and less. I often zoom through the music blog posts on my Google Reader page, and I haven’t been on far too many of my other music sites in quite a while. Swole Ear is consuming me, musically, at least. I completely missed the release of Panda Bear’s newest full-length Tomboy, demonstrating Swole Ear’s massive amount of power over me.
Well, Panda Bear is up to his old tricks again. If you loved Person Pitch, his last record, you’ll have plenty to like about Tomboy. He’s still got the same odd out-there voice, and still uses way too much reverb. He has established his own sound, which you really can hear break through on many Animal Collective songs, and especially on his solo work.
The first thing that struck me about Tomboy is the track count. Time-wise it’s about the same length as Person Pitch, which has seven songs. Tomboy has 11. This worried me at first, because when I think of Panda Bear, I think of a guy who can drag out a song really well, and make the listening experience all the more rewarding. Not seeing one ten-minute track on Tomboy threw me off, and I was concerned that Panda Bear may have slipped a bit.
Fortunately, I was dead wrong. At the moment, Tomboy is tied with Person Pitch for awesomeness in my mind. The shorter song lengths means Panda Bear really gets to the juicy parts of the songs quickly, which can be both a positive and negative. You don’t get the awesome connection that you form with a 12-minute song like Bro’s, but it does mean that Tomboy cuts straight to the good stuff.
Swole Ear 
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