Being the completely crazy person that I am, I took the 150-mile drive to Portland two days after Bumbershoot ended for the tenth annual Musicfest Northwest. I still hadn’t caught up with the 10 or so hours of missed sleep and I was yet to lose some more. But hey, I’m young. I can still do that sort of thing.
Why did I decide to drive down on Wednesday? Panda Bear was playing at the Crystal Ballroom that night. That’s why.
It had been just over a year since I saw Animal Collective live for the first time, and I was in need of some of their genius. Apparently a lot of other people felt the exact same way, because that place with its bouncy walking-on-a-cloud floor filled up fast.
With the Crystal Ballroom already smelling of cannabis and man sweat, Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear took the stage at just after 10 p.m. With nothing but a Fender Stratocaster, his big table of electronic gadgets, and a screen projecting trippy visuals throughout his set, Panda Bear was mesmerizing. I say mesmerizing because he’s not what you could call “entertaining” in the usual sense of the word. Hundreds of people swayed in unison to his heavy psychedelic beats, causing the floor to almost vibrate from the collective movement.
Panda Bear played several new songs off his upcoming album Tomboy, which currently doesn’t have an actual release date, but he says “near the end of 2010.” Well it’s nearing the end of 2010, and we still don’t know when we’ll get to hear the whole record. That fact also made this gig even sweeter, 
because we did get to hear these new rhythmic journeys into Lennox’s mind, as well as some of the sample-heavy (but absolutely fantastic) Person Pitch.
It’s daunting to think about a follow-up to such a great album as Person Pitch, but Lennox took Tomboy as a chance for a departure from the sampling, and to focus more on heavy rhythm and guitar. And in a live situation, that certainly makes for a more interesting show, as Lennox’s performance was more organic than if he has been strictly pressing buttons the whole time.
Plus, the use of more traditional instrumentation paired with the sometimes psychotically captivating song crafting of Animal Collective helped differentiate Lennox’s solo stuff from the band.
Panda Bear started off the show with “Drone,” a song that literally shook the crowd into attention, as if we weren’t attentive enough already. The loud and often startling back and forth tones paired with Panda Bear’s – for the lack of a better term – droning voice flooded the room with sound and vibration. In the Crystal Ballroom, you don’t just hear the music; you actually feel it. From there he transitioned right into “Tomboy,” the first single off the upcoming album, which was further enriched from the recorded version to include Lennox’s random shrieks of Lennox also had a beautiful drawn-out version of “Daily Routine” that built so much 
anticipation that I could see the people around me mouthing the words to the song even before he sang them. “Slow Motion” was one of the stand out new tracks, with its addicting bass line, one that you’d almost hear in a modern hip-hop song.
After the just-under-an-hour set Panda Bear quietly exited the stage, almost as if he was completely unaware of the awesome show he’d just put on. And the throngs of people slowly filed out of the doorway and down the two flights of stairs outside. That was by far the only way to start off another 5 nights of great music all throughout Portland.
This was going to be a long weekend.
