Panda Bear Spins Us Around A Liminal Fever Dream On ‘Mr Noah’
Freak Folk Indie mainstays Animal Collective have a pretty deep barrier to entry. Their music can be complex, scattershot, meandering, beautiful, droning and brilliant. Sometimes all in the same track. But chances are the tracks you do enjoy, the ones with the most locked-in melodies, are spearheaded by core member Panda Bear. No surprise then that he’s the one who has had the most fruitful solo career.
It’s within this intersection of Panda Bear’s knack for crafting repetitious earworms and his history with being unafraid to dig deep and tug at weird, discordant emotions that we find the music video for ‘Mr Noah’ off his 2015 album, Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper.
The song alone feels like a queasy fever dream. That’s a compliment though, as he’s clearly aiming for a certain off feeling and boy does he nail it.
The video takes place in between two halves of a slum apartment complex. Right off the bat, the camera is swirling in a circle, there’s a dog on a chain leash attached to the concrete and he’s already barking. The visuals slip quickly in and out of these wavy light-blots.
The camera pans up and we see a woman throwing clothes out of her window. We cut back down and a man gets up and walks up a flight of stairs, only to walk back down and up those same stairs. What type of M.C. Escher nightmare are we in right now?
This theme of having people constantly repeat their actions by re-entering their own scenes runs through the entire video. Whether it’s a woman walking through to do her laundry or showing that woman in the apartment as she constantly crashes through a pair of orange curtains while going back to grab more stuff (the same stuff?) to throw.
The entire time, that dog won’t stop barking. Until the final seconds of the video, that is. As the scene in between the apartments turns to night, at a point where it looks like chaos has fully broken out, that damn dog is as quiet as a church mouse. Almost as if he’s been giving off some kind of dark energy this entire time and is now satiated.
This video is not going to be for everyone. Just like how some people feel like David Lynch has a deeper handle on true, visceral, mess-with-your-head fear than most actual Horror directors; to those on a certain wavelength, ‘Mr Noah’ is a perfect encapsulation of that hazy, sickly state where you’re in a deep fever dream. You know your body is tossing and turning and your dream keeps repeating itself. A dream that’s not even scary on the surface, but everything just feels several degrees sideways.
Some artists strive to make you feel good. It’s about putting smiles on faces, after all. While others are in it to capture a feeling or to articulate something that is hard to process. I can’t tell you how often you’ll be throwing ‘Mr Noah’ on repeat off sheer enjoyment. But I can say with certainty that the entire package perfectly evokes something very specific within a certain type of headspace.
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