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All music composed by Noah Lennox (AKA Panda Bear).

Young Prayer was the second solo-effort from Noah Lennox, one of the founding members of the critically acclaimed underground indie/folk project Animal Collective. The album follows on nicely from the lo-fi exploration of his 1998 self-titled debut, whilst simultaneously setting the scene for the subsequent burst of vibrant full colour that would permeate the very core of his critically acclaimed third album, the potential future masterpiece Person Pitch, released in March of this year. You could also draw parallels with various Animal Collective releases, in particular Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (essentially a collaboration between principal members Avey Tare and Panda Bear) and Danse Manatee, both of which capture that odd combination of the pastoral and the ambient merging into night. I suppose the problem in discussing the work of Animal Collective, either as a group or as single players, is in trying to avoid the sense of over-ecstatic, adolescent hyperbole that often flows so flowery from every awkward descriptive couplet… but I suppose, more often the not, the music — which remains both rich and textured, yet curiously minimal and impressionistic — often calls for such a critical arrangement.

It’s always easy to be swayed by hyperbole when discussion any band, and in particular the highly fashionable Animal Collective; perhaps when we’re reading too much into the Pitchfork hero worshiping or the gushing testimony of seventeen year old scensters who will jump on anything that seems relatively obscure and divorced from the mainstream simply because it gives them a vantage point over their various school and college colleagues who are still listening to the chart-friendly likes of the Klaxons or Arctic Monkeys. Hype often gets in the way and can change your perspective of a potentially great band or album, all because the bubbling bubonic blather of online bloggers and arm chair critics have fooled you into buying too many damp squibs. I call it the “greatest band on earth” curse. Too often this phrase gets banded about, simply from kids trying to claim individuality en masse, turning the music into a fashion statement as opposed to a creative statement. Think of an album like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1997); once an unsung classic, now a benchmark that all other so called indie-fashionistas must be measured against. Drop a reference to it on a message board or your Myspace/Facebook/Last FM profiles and gain 10 points of indie credibility. It’s enough to turn you off the album for life, which would be a real tragedy, as it’s probably the Astral Weeks of the 1990’s.

Animal Collective are sort of in the same sphere, I’d reckon; mostly in the sense that there are people out their that would claim themselves as fans — whilst seriously hyping them to the heavens — when, in reality, they probably don’t even like the music all that much. But like I said… you really have to cut through the hype and the hyperbole and take the record on it’s own merits, and clearly, for me at least, Animal Collective are an incredibly talented band of musicians filled with depth, intelligence and imagination, as this solo offering further proves. The following paragraphs will no doubt conform quite shamefully to the style of writing I criticised earlier; overly cryptic and filled with arcane descriptions. I know this for a fact because I’ve already written the bulk of it, and I am now trying to piece it all together into something that is less decadent and self-indulgent. That said, Young Prayer, like it’s follow up Person Pitch, is an album that simply DEMANDS a personal interpretation, as the very subject matter is filtered through the gauze of human suffering; with death, loss, guilt and inevitable expression of overcoming such tragedy practically permeating the space between every reverberating note.

With that in mind, I can honestly imagine this being an album that many people won’t like. A sparse and far-out record that fuses elements of folk, psychedelic pop, world music and hints of ambient noise in a manner that seems entirely devoid of all sense of structure, formality and predictability. As a listening experience it’s odd and disconcerting; an experimental work about death that is both cold and distant and yet, remains something that never becomes maudlin or self-pitying. It is an album with a recognisable emotional theme, and yet, one in which the lyrics are muffled by the cacophonous clamour of instruments or instead, replaced completely by a series of abstract and incomprehensible moans, groans, grunts and sneezes. As a result, it is an album that slips unconsciously between the misery of death and the poetry of life, as oddly tuned acoustic guitars are strummed in a manner that draw forth an army of atonal notes, all marching broken-backed from the hollow, rotted reed of the instrument itself; as the guttural moans and animal yelps express a sadness that regular words would only struggle and trip in their attempts to convey.

It’s bleak and uninviting music, no question; marauding from the core of a decaying apple on the mossy cleft of a dying black forest, as elves and nymphs recoil in horror at the ominous spectre of death that stands, looming long beneath the shadowy tree-branched of a hangmen-menace, with each gargled word or riddled ripple of notes that reverberate only managing to capture the coldly distant and entirely uncomfortable feeling of D.E.A.T.H. Furthermore, the eventually shift in tone that arrives midway through the album could be seen as signifying the moment of grief turning into acceptance and the moment in which the sadness of death gives way to the beauty of life and indeed, creativity; with the tone and timbre of the voice both suggesting so much in between. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but in truth, the black and hazy nature of the record only invites multiple interpretations, with the album reminding me of the stark minimalism of albums like the 1998 self-titled offering from former Talk Talk front man Mark Hollis, the 2002 “brackets” album by Sigur Rós, and Blemish, the 2003 solo offering from the former Japan vocalist David Sylvian.

Like those albums, Young Prayer is effectively an impressionistic piece; a blank canvas that the listener can project their own personal thought and feelings onto. This is evident from the use of untitled tracks, vague, lyric-less vocals and the overall otherworldliness of the music. This allows the listen to form their own interpretations of the songs, often focusing on the odd piece of production or instrumentation, or even a fluttering vocal line, as opposed to anything in the way of hooks. It’s also hard to pigeonhole the album into any kind of generic category, although obviously, as with Animal Collective, you can see the influence of various alternative or psychedelic folk acts from the late 60’s and early 70’s, most prominently The Incredibly String Band, who also drew very heavily on the combined influence of whimsical visions suggested by natures with a sound that seemed rooted in world music; in particular Spanish flamenco music, Indian music and traditional folk. Young Prayer also has the added influence of minimal, electronic, ambient noise; suggesting an alternate reality in which Eno — if you’ll forgive the cliché — produced Wee Tam and The Big Huge (or something like that).

Although the influences are there, and you can group it in with other records that were moving in a similar direction, Young Prayer remains one of those albums that sounds like nothing else… or indeed, nothing I can really think of. Even the subsequent Person Pitch sounds as far removed from the minimal moans and acoustics of the album in question as you could possibly get; sounding warm and celebratory, whereas this is cold and dejected (as you would imagine from an album about death). Like I said at the start of the reviews, this isn’t easy listening, and it’s certainly not an album that a lot of people will “enjoy”, but at the same time, it’s never dull, depressing or self-pitying. Instead, it’s a shimmering, shining testament to the spirit of creativity, and the notion of music as a pure and transcendent statement capable of healing all pain and righting all wrongs.