Pitchfork

"Recorded live in Lisbon," is becoming a familiar refrain with the odds and ends we've heard from Panda Bear's Noah Lennox this year. This particular excerpt from a 2004 show (the track runs 16 minutes in its full version) lays the man's sample-happy pop loop aesthetic bare, as he improvises a new melody worthy of Goffin and King over a captured fragment of Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang" and then slides into a booth next to Scott Walker to riff on a housed-up version of the ghostly epilogue from "Two Ragged Soldiers". The audacity in these appropriations is heartening, but even more exciting is the depth at which Lennox is listening to pop history, his obvious understanding of the mix and where he fits in it.