Reset by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom - Album Review

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, Reset, August 12, 2022, Domino Recording Co Ltd.

by Courtney Skaggs

In August, I finally made the drive out to Dalton Highway, all the way past the arctic circle, almost to Coldfoot. I’ve been telling people that my experience visiting Alaska’s arctic region was revelatory –a mental and spiritual reset of sorts– and I really do mean that. 

I’ve also been saying that, for the first time in my life, I did experience silence up there, which is only half-true at best. 

Among bird calls, foot falls, and the sounds of distant cars, I listened to music, including Reset, a collaborative album from Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Sonic Boom (Pete Kember). 

Reset is not the first time the two musicians have teamed up to create music. In fact, Sonic Boom co-mixed and mastered Panda Bear’s 2011 album, Tomboy, and co-produced Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper in 2015. However, Reset marks the first time the pair have shared full artistic credit for their work. Panda Bear’s official page on Band Camp explains more about the collaborative process he and Sonic Boom undertook during the making of Reset: 

Sonic Boom’s notion was simple enough: After lugging his records to Portugal years ago, his fascination was renewed by old favorites and standards he had not heard in years. Something struck him, the way the ornate intros by Eddie Cochran or The Everly Brothers felt largely like stage curtains, compelling in their own right even if they had very little to do with the hits that followed. Sonic Boom began crafting loops from these preambles, twisting and bending the parts like scrap metal before sending them onto Panda Bear.

And so, amidst the anxiety-riddled chaos of the lockdown period during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, two musicians sought solace in sending one another sonic messages —a sample here, a voice track there— until, it seems, an entire album’s worth of new songs came into existence. 

The result is a spiritual medicine akin to visiting a new biome for the very first time. 

My only complaint about the album reveals more about my personal flaws than it does about Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s work as musicians. At only nine tracks and a runtime of roughly thirty-eight minutes, I find myself desperate for more each time I listen to it. It could very well be that I have been corrupted into a voracious, parasitic consumer, eager to suck the lifeblood out of my favorite musicians; or, arguably more likely, it could be that these artists have trained my ears and mind for much longer musical rides than they were willing to bring me along for with Reset. Sonic Boom has gifted the world a plethora of longform songs both as a solo artist and through his work with the psychedelic project band Spacemen 3. Panda Bear is similarly involved with Animal Collective, one of the greatest jam bands of the twenty-first century. However, with its short, saccharine, sample-laden pop experiments, it is clear that concision was the aim for Reset. 

When time allows, I am definitely a full-album listener and I enjoy the ride, albeit short, that Reset takes me on. It is the perfect soundtrack for riding the Dalton Highway —fueled by anxious hope, knowing “something’s coming ‘round the bend,” but never being quite sure what it will be, nevertheless trusting it will be spectacular. 

Much like a lifelong city-dweller experiencing silence for the first time traveling through the arctic, the revelatory feeling of the silence that comes after Reset is only made possible by the sonic journey the album provides. There is a power in that silence that makes listeners eager to hear it again through new ears. 

To the end of this cold landscape 

I’ll keep coming back for more.