Sinister Grift by Panda Bear

The artist at #24 has been with the Bacon Top 31 since the very beginning. Panda Bear, whose real name is Noah Lennox, is a founding and current member of Animal Collective, whose 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion was #3 in 2009 and is likely the album I’ve listened to the most from that year’s top 10. (Does that make Merriweather the actual best album of 2009? Likely. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

Born in 1978, Panda Bear started producing music at 21/22 years old, with the release of his self-titled debut album in 1999. His first official album with Animal Collective is their debut album, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished¹ from the year 2000. Since then, Lennox and his Animal Collective friends have been making music together and in various combinations of solo, duos, and triples ever since. In addition to the 12 albums Animal Collective have released, Panda Bear has released eight other albums, putting him at a pace of roughly three albums every four years for the past 26 years.

That is one hell of a pace for a person to be creating music. Granted, not one of those albums since the release of Merriweather has broken into the Top 31 until now. But to have been making music practically non-stop since 2000 and to still create something unexpected, relevant, and pleasing 26 years later is a huge accomplishment.

Sinister Grift, Panda Bear’s eighth official solo album, is pure joy, and unmistakably Panda Bear. It’s full of bouncy melodies, copious amounts of reverb, and doubled/tripled/quadrupled Beach-Boy-like harmonies. Engineered and mixed by Lennox’s second-grade classmate and Animal Collective bandmate Deakin (real name: Josh Dibb), you could easily mistake the album as being from the full Collective rather than just the two of them.

Numerous people helped with the album, including the other two members of Animal Collective, Geologist (real name: Brian Weltz) and Avey Tare (real name: David Portner), on a handful of songs. Cindy Lee, whose triple album Diamond Jubilee was on the Top 31 at #7 last year, performs on the wonderful song “Defense,” dropping in a masterful guitar solo in the middle of the song.

The video above, for the song “Ferry Lady,” is indicative of Panda Bear and Animal Collective’s trippy aesthetic. Just watch 30 seconds of the video above and you’ll swear someone has dropped something in your orange juice. The video for “Praise” is equally psychedelic.

Lennox put together an actual live band to tour the new album, a first for the Collective. You can watch them perform three songs on their “Tiny Desk Concert” for NPR earlier this year. I had the pleasure of seeing Panda Bear on the band’s tour back in May, and it was lovely if a little underwhelming. Through no fault of their own, I was seeing the band in the middle of my busiest show-going week of the year. Sandwiched between Sharon van Etten, Kendrick & SZA, and Jack White on one side, and Cheekface and Black Country, New Road on the other, my brain and body were experiencing live-show overload, and I was not prepared for the mellow chillwave ² attack that Panda Bear delivered.

I’ve been listening to Sinister Grift on repeat all day today, and I’m now beginning to wonder if I’ve underestimated the staying power of this album. Outside of Animal Collective’s Merriweather and their 2005 album Feels, I have a feeling this new album by Panda Bear is going to keep finding its way back into my rotation. Maybe you’ll feel the same way.

^{1. This album was actually first released as an album by Avey Tare and Panda Bear. It was reclassified as the debut album by Animal Collective sometime later.↩}
^{2. Panda Bear’s unbelievably good 2007 album Person Pitch is credited as the start of the electronic music microgenre “chillwave.” That album, and subsequent songs by Animal Collective and others, carved out a fairly substantial area of the music industry for themselves, resulting in the rise of bands like Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro y Moi.↩}

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Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee

Mystery and suspense have an affect on my musical tastes. I can’t define exactly what the impact is, but mystique adds a little something to the music. Underground or up-and-coming bands are part of it – getting to hear them before anyone else has. But there’s also something positive to a band themselves being mysterious. Look at Sault, for instance, who were #1 in 2022 and have appeared three other times on the list, despite not ever definitively naming the artists behind the music.

Cindy Lee, the artist whose unbelievably good double-album Diamond Jubilee shows up here at #7, brings mystery of a different kind: limited availability. You won’t find this album on any streaming sources (at least not legally – the artist is constantly having to fight fake accounts posting their beautiful work to Spotify). I first heard of the album from my friend Pete, via text back on April 12, of which he said “Interesting album” and linked me to the glowing Pitchfork review of the album (the 9.1 they gave the album is the highest rank of any album of the last four years — music discovery in 2024 is very different from music discovery of old.) At that time of the text, there were two ways to listen to the album: a full-album YouTube link (shown above, as it is literally the only video related to the album that has been put out, and whose 2-hour length breaks the mold on length of video posted on my site) or a freemium download from Cindy Lee’s Realistik Studios GeoCities website. Today, the only way to “own” the album is to purchase the album for download or on vinyl on Bandcamp – and I highly recommend that you do.

Cindy Lee is the alter ego of singer/songwriter Patrick Flegel. Flegel cross-dresses as Cindy Lee whenever he performs live, which is currently not often. When he released the album he booked a nationwide tour that started on April 6. On April 12, the Pitchfork review happened, changing the dynamic of the tour drastically. Just shy of a month later, on May 4, Flegel canceled the rest of the tour due to personal reasons. Between the canceled tour, and “going rogue” from the music industry (as Flegel has said in the past), it’s easy to draw conclusions that he is a recluse, scared of fame. Apparently at one of his last shows, Lee said on stage “I feel like a caged fucking animal,” which would seem to back up that story.

The album is a wonder to behold. It is free of time – it could have come out in 1965, 1985, or 2025. The album is two hours of non-stop jaw-dropping indie rock that Flegel mostly plays all by himself. The voice he brings to the songs – sometimes doo woo girl band (but with only one girl), sometimes folky Nico-esque, sometimes baritone crooner – is almost always sung with so much reverb it sounds like he’s standing in the back of a cavernous hall. The music is equally muted – sounding as if you’ve put on an aged vinyl record.

Diamond Jubilee is Cindy Lee’s seventh album. Only two of those albums are available for streaming, so this coy “just try and find me” vibe is not new. Despite all the hoops, Lee has built something magical here, and the people have come. Perhaps we’ll get something new from him yet, but honestly these two phenomenal hours will suit me just fine.

#24 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Panda Bear

#7 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Cindy Lee