After downloading Panda Bear’s Person Pitch in late 2013, it sat dormant in my old iTunes library for a considerable amount of time. It was then that I was a real Pitchfork-head and going through what are considered to be the indie classics. And plus I was the host of a show for my university’s radio station, so I was just downloading whatever album I could get, and whatever songs that stuck out were keepers. ‘Comfy in Nautica’ and ‘Ponytail’ were the two tracks on the album that I decided were the best. And that was how my judgement stayed until I revisited the album in 2016. I was working at a music magazine at the time. There was a lot of time I could spend on Spotify without being judged. And I remember that being a time when I was going through the albums I had at home that I hadn’t listened to for a long time. Animal Collective had either just released Painting With or it was on the horizon. Person Pitch had the obvious association. I ran through it again. And it’s amazing what being 21 compared to 18 can do because the whole album was an immediate click. Maybe I just didn’t have all the cells in 2013.

After the kind of chanting, call-to-action introduction of ‘Comfy in Nautica’, ‘Take Pills’ arrives next and marks the first instance of the production trick Noah Lennox utilises to great effect for a few numbers on the LP, which is merging a sample from one song into another from a totally different number over a carefully thought-out period of time. In this case, he uses the opening of Scott Walker’s ‘Always Coming Back to You’ for the first section – which I think he in turn times that with what sounds like a skateboard on the sidewalk – before that slowly transitions into the next section from 2:30 based on a sample of ‘Popeye Twist’ by the Tornados. The song as a whole is inspired by the state of Lennox’s family and his own wellbeing, after the tragic passing of his father. The first half depicts the grieving process of his mom, who passes on the advice that things eventually get better after the loss. And despite initial impressions you may have from the the song title, the second half is call not to resort to drugs in order to handle that struggle during those sad, sad situations. Because we’re stronger and we don’t need them. A very wholesome message.

There are plenty of songs out there in the sphere made by combining pieces of unrelated musical ideas together. You’ve got ‘The Chain’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Paranoid Android’… Could go on for days listing them. And ‘Take Pills’ is very much in that category. But what makes it so unique is how its two sections are blended so seamlessly into one another – a gradual fade-out/fade-in with a huge reliance on samples – that shouldn’t work as well as it does, though somehow manages to make sense once that Lennox begins the “Take one day at a time” refrain. Gets the shoulders shimmying. I like the little aside Panda Bear in saying that it’s not bad to take pills. I can think of a song of his where he sings about wanting to get stoned and walk in the rain. He likes to get high every once in a while too. But just don’t rely on the stuff. That’s where things can get a little out of hand. So this is where the road ends for Person Pitch on here. Not so much for Panda Bear. If only I’d liked ‘Bros’ as much back in the day as I do now. That would have been an ordeal to write about. But if you haven’t heard of the album before now, I’d say you’ve got nothing to lose if you listened to the thing right now.