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Apr 12, 2011Both less sunny and more accessible than Person Pitch, Tomboy is broken down into bite-sized, relatively straightforward morsels of melody buttressed by percolating polyrhythms, twinkling guitar, piano-based hooks, and Lennox's choirboy emoting.
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Apr 15, 2011While it will inevitably be argued as to whether or not Tomboy is really a work of startling originality or perhaps just a long lost companion to Björk's Vespertine, it's hard to deny positing that we've got one of the best albums of 2011 finally in our hands.
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Apr 13, 2011While still featuring the repetition and reverb that embodies much of Lennox's work, Tomboy is more divisible, and more accessible for a downloaded generation, or listeners looking to simply dabble their toes.
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy is every bit as good as it promised to be, and more.
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Apr 11, 2011Whichever route you choose, one thing remains unflinching: this album is guaranteed to please.
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Apr 12, 2011Tomboy is a tricked-out, big-budget epic built for IMAX.
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Apr 12, 2011With Tomboy, Lennox valiantly accepts the responsibilities he once invoked on Prayer, now seeming to possess answers to some of the questions as well.
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Apr 12, 2011The whole thing sort of pops into existence, an idea and a testament, and instead of resolving, wistfully swoons into silence, all a dream. But maybe that's what Lennox was going for.
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy is a much more considered record, with thickly layered psych-style production.
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Apr 26, 2011Sometimes, in the wrong mood, Tomboy can come across as eleven great songs chipping away at each other.
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Apr 8, 2011The woozy, reverb-rich result makes for great headphone swimming (also: infant appeasement!), but Lennox is at his best with a groove to submerge.
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Apr 29, 2011It's really only when you find the time to sit down and listen to it all that it starts making sense. Yes, this may require some patience, but you will be rewarded.
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Apr 19, 2011Here Panda retreats to inscrutable, heavenly distance, and while force of emotion might not suit an album whose foundations are laid on force of sound, I still find myself wishing he'd fully explore his more human side someday.
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UncutApr 12, 2011The result is a record that demands to live not in some mythologised '80s, but in the here and now. [May 2011, p.81]
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy finds him in sustained reflection, singing sublimely about the managing of expectations. It's a deeply interior album, but with an acute awareness of the space it inhabits, and the impression it hopes to leave.
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Apr 11, 2011Despite Tomboy's significant changes, it feels less like a radical shift than a subtle progression; while it may not be quite as dazzling as Person Pitch, it should still please fans of that album and Lennox's many other outlets.
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Apr 8, 2011While much here can be summarised as more of the same, when Lennox's natural quality control operates at such an admirable standard, that's precisely why Tomboy is such a chilled-out triumph.
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Apr 8, 2011From the stark black-and-white artwork to the sounds within, Panda Bear's fourth album scales back, proffering succinctness rather than sprawl, exchanging samplers for sequencers, in favor of added warmth and intimacy.
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Apr 7, 2011Even when the lyrics betray nagging anxieties, Lennox sounds joyful, illuminating the darkness of Slow Motion like shooting stars, breaking through Alsatian Darn like the sun through a storm.
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May 19, 2011Tomboy's an ambitious work that finds its power and grandiosity in the slightest moments – an album that demands headphones, yet equally compels to crank the stereo.
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Apr 13, 2011In the end, Lennox's dueling ambitions leave Tomboy in a singular place--a strange, almost devotional record to get lost in.
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy's best quality is its consistency with Lennox's vision, in spite of the critical hullabaloo surrounding it.
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Apr 13, 2011For the most part, Panda Bear manages to fall somewhere in between, creating a work that can be appreciated as both interesting from a compositional standpoint and enjoyable as an extension of his creative path over the past several years.
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Apr 15, 2011It could have been so easy for an album that's strung out on the tension between artist as paid-up perma-kid and responsible grown-up to be self-indulgent and, worse still, boring. Instead it's cathartic.
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Apr 12, 2011Sure, Lennox makes a lot of pretty noise on this album, but sometimes you just want to pluck him from his own sound waves and have him try to navigate them from the inside of a more firmly constructed ship.
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Apr 12, 2011Noah Lennox makes music swathed in so much synth noise, ambient voices and ricocheting stereophonic WTFs, it can feel like you're swept into a tidal wave of bong water.
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Apr 11, 2011I'm not sure if I'll ever be sold on his approach, but scattered moments do shine.
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Apr 11, 2011Certainly, Tomboy, recorded in a dark basement in sun-soaked Lisbon, delivers its fair share of primal pleasures and sacred ecstasies.
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Q MagazineMay 17, 2011Such is the electronic murk elsewhere, it feels better to dabble your toes in this record than plunge right in. [May 2011, p.120]
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The WireMay 3, 2011It's impressive on the first few listens, it grows irritating with repeat play. [Apr 2011, p.57]
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Apr 15, 2011On its own, Tomboy isn't moving forward but it isn't treading water, either. Lennox performs a tricky balancing act in that sense.
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Apr 14, 2011It's a gentle, woozy mood-scape in which nostalgia for the candyfloss summers of childhood shades imperceptibly into the sweet melancholy of encroaching autumn.
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Apr 14, 2011While Person Pitch rippled with punctuated sound, Tomboy is a cyclic plateau, a triumph of building algorithms that gradually add plushness and sonic density, but very little movement.
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Apr 12, 2011On Tomboy, he seems about half-awake, caught between the haziness of sleep and the defensiveness of waking life.
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy once again sees Lennox creating a distinctive, hypnotic sound-world - but it sometimes feels too much like a world from which there is a strong desire to escape.
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MojoMay 17, 2011Rather than gaining urgency Tomboy instead feels rhythmically constrained and sonically muted. [May 2011, p.100]
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Apr 11, 2011Tomboy doesn't speak loud enough for us to hear it. It hums, rather; it mumbles. It actually can't speak.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 56 out of 62
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Mixed: 6 out of 62
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Negative: 0 out of 62
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Apr 19, 2011
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May 11, 2011
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Apr 19, 2011