Modern Music: Panda Bear, Battles, Marnie Stern

Those were different times.
All the poets, they studied rules of verse,
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes.
--Lou Reed, "Sweet Jane"

Panda Bear makes music that often resembles the music Brian Wilson made over forty years ago. Many of the tracks on Person Pitch resemble tracks from the Pet Sounds box set that came out a while back: like most of the music has been stripped away, leaving only the vocals. Onto this, Panda Bear has added slight instrumentation and a lot of background noise, so that it sometimes sounds like you are listening to a Beach Boys song coming out of someone else's window. You strain closer to hear some more.

The similarities to Brian Wilson are more than surface-level: both Pet Sounds and Person Pitch are products of individuals who are clearly obsessed with sound. How many hours did Wilson spend layering track upon track in the studio? Probably more hours, overall, than Panda Bear spent at his laptop, but the obsession is the same. The inspired concept behind the bicycle horn on "You Still Believe in Me" takes on a much larger role for Panda Bear; Wilson's sonic epiphany--that any sound can make music--is a pervasive principle in much modern music. Panda Bear exercises that principle with a good ear, but he has traded in Wilson's fondness for layering instruments with one for layering found and created sound, only some of which you can place. On Person Pitch, you won't find a song with frailing banjo and baritone sax paired together for the instrumental break, but there is still a great sound to admire here.

If the brand of rock and roll favored by those of us who came of age in the latter decades of the 20th century is to have a future, that future is Battles. The thing about Battles is the groove, which finds expression in a curious but exciting dynamic between the organic (real drums, expertly managed by John Stanier, formerly of the metrically diverse metal band Helmet) and the digital (keyboards, looping stations, pedals of various sorts). For Battles, the human voice is truly just another instrument: most of the vocals are so processed that even when there are words (as opposed to ohs and ahs) only snatches of a phrase here and there can be deciphered. Mainstream popular music uses vocal technology as a substitution for the real thing--as a corrective for poor singing--whereas technology is, for Battles, the real thing. The music they play is active and intricate, functioning on several levels at once. The video for "Atlas" shows the members of the band grooving together inside a revolving, futuristic glass box. If Battles is visiting us from the future, let's hope that they decide to stay a while.

The fact that Marnie Stern seems such an improbable choice for indie-rock guitar hero exposes a latent sexism that persists in rock music. Despite the fact that the role of guitar hero (of the non-video-game variety) stills seems to be reserved primarily for men, Stern's finger-tapping guitar style can only be described as shredding in classic Eddie Van Halen fashion, but with a contemporary twist: like Battles and Panda Bear, Stern relies heavily on looping, and the pounding fury of drums (supplied by Hella's Zach Hill) that serves as her primary accompaniment places her more in the punk tradition than in the hard-rock tradition associated with Van Halen. Stern's songs are loud and stoner-clever. "Plato's F****d Up Cave" and "Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling" are worth more than a chuckle, though; they display genuine creativity, and the guitar playing is exciting. But it's the opening track, "Vibrational Match," that defines Stern's sound. Amid the sonic fury, her voice fits nicely, soothing and sometimes a little comic.

What's exciting about all three of these acts is that they prove the vibrancy of rock and roll as a musical idiom. All along--acoustic sidetracks by Neil Young and so many others aside--rock music is an embracement of technology, and the music has to change as the technology does. Rock was created by act and compulsion of history--though Link Wray's discovery that he could poke a hole in the speaker cone of his amplifier and get distortion was a key innovation. It's in the amplifiers, the cables, the magnets. The racket they make is so glorious sometimes that it's all anyone can do to get up and shout along with it.