Panda Bear of Animal Collective Young Prayer

The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional Sung Tongs and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document Campfire Songs had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century American version of sacred music. It's an approach in which voices say more with music than they ever could with words, and it's why the Beach Boys transcended their dorky lyrics as easily as Animal Collective transcend unintelligibility.

Key Collective member Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) conceived Young Prayer, his first widely available solo album, in response to the death of his father, in the very house where the man passed away. Though it's Panda solo, Young Prayer is easily identifiable as an Animal Collective release in the Campfire Songs and Sung Tongs mode, and other Collective members contribute here and there. I asked Lennox once if any particular Animal Collective member was the "pop guy," prone to push the band to a more tuneful and accessible direction, and he denied the existence of such a creature. Comparing Young Prayer side-by-side with the Avey Tare split EP on Leaf, however, Panda fits the profile.

There are no song titles on Young Prayer, but it seems destined to be the kind of cult record, like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, for which listeners will make up their own. Actually, everything about it suggests cult; it's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by a few more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody. Young Prayer is incredibly personal and naked, but it's also unique, and it will doubtless disappear and be rediscovered periodically as years pass.

Though Young Prayer is extremely accessible and consists mostly of voice, guitar, and piano, the "tunes" are hard to source. No folk or pop music I can name is structured quite like this. In an odd way, Young Prayer seems inspired by Gregorian chant, as notes seem bent in accordance to a mysterious logic recorded in some dusty scroll. The inspiration of the mass is most prevalent on Track 7, where the deep, aquatic echo seems as if it were achieved by having Lennox sing on one end of the Sistine Chapel into a microphone posted at the other. The final track, in which Lennox sings at the bottom end of his range, sounds even more like a monk channeling a biblical precept in Latin, and augmented by two overlapping piano lines inspired by classical minimalism (the Reich homage is reminiscent of the piano line from Stereolab's "Blue Milk"). It's hard to imagine a more lovely or appropriate closer.

The arrangements are simple as can be, with the majority of the nine tracks (it's a perfectly short album at just under 30 minutes) consisting of acoustic guitar and voice, and the sequencing is superb. As the second track ends at an emotional peak with the word "rejoice," the minute-long guitar and piano interlude lightly carried the listener to the next, more emotionally exhausting song. And after the fourth track, which is the most evocative of Campfire Songs of anything here, with its unsteady acoustic banging and singing that seems design to disappear quietly into the night sky, a summer camp chant-and-clap canon follows to bring us back down to earth.

Where Campfire Songs was filled with odd overlapping harmonies, Young Prayer finds Lennox typically using a single track for vocals, alternating between a quavering tenor and an even more unsteady falsetto. The fearlessness of his singing here, as Lennox navigates odd runs and subjects his melodies to unusual effects, is the heart of Young Prayer. He's a good singer, no question, but fortunately, he refuses to compose within his limitations. Moments such as the tail end of the first track, when he jumps up an octave to finish the phrase "how you will know me" (my best guess-- the diction makes precise lyric decoding exceedingly difficult) at a point a note above his falsetto range, lends a layer of incredible poignancy.

If Brian Wilson's ultimate goal was to create a "teenage symphony to god," Panda Bear and the rest of Animal Collective realize that the liturgical part of that equation was most important. Lyrics may be hard to make out and budgets are far too low for symphonies, but the god part they have down, and those moments in life we get close to but can never quite explain inspire every note of Young Prayer. - Pitchfork rated 8,5