The folks over at Pitchfork have put up a DVD of Panda Bear and various artists who opened for him on his miniature 2007 tour for Person Pitch. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, so I got the chance to see one of the shows. Watching the video brought up a slew of points that I’d love to get across in a series of posts. The first of these is the most simple and will probably make me sound older and crotchetier than my twenty-three years.

The concert was too loud.

Panda Bear faithfully executed the tracks from Person Pitch as well as early versions of some of the tracks that would later appear on Animal Collective’s most-recent, Merriweather Post Pavillion. I was slightly disappointed that experiencing most of these tracks live meant a similar experience to listening to the record. I wasn’t expecting anything more than that, but one still feels let-down leaving a show having heard songs reproduced with button presses and no showy show.

The acoustics were a bit rough in the First Unitarian Church, with a bright, harsh reverb that blurred out any of the subtleties of the music. Panda Bear’s voice was EQed horribly, if at all. Everything he sang sounded quite muddy. And the volume of the show was an onslaught. There were no dynamics. A more relaxed song came across just as powerfully as one of Panda Bear’s more ebullient tracks. My ears got tired fast and so did my brain. When the music has no dynamics you get bored. It strips away a layer of emotional impact. The lack of dynamics could have been attributed to Panda Bear himself and a lack of ability to manipulate his hardware to breathe in a musical way, but even if this was the case, there was no need to have the show be as loud as it was. My fiancee and I were in the back row, center – right in front of the mixing board – so you’d think we’d have the perfect mix. Not so. I put my fingers in my ears, and it was only then that the show sounded good. The harshness of the room was filtered out and I could actually make out the music much clearer.

In summary, it was fun to go out and go to a show. I like Panda Bear and am always interested to see what he writes. The show, though, was bad. It was boring for lack of dynamics and exhausting because I had to keep my fingers in my ears the whole time. Why does it have to be common practice these days to bring earplugs to concerts? It just seems ridiculous. Some music begs to be loud to a point where you feel the sound vibrating you bones, but Panda Bear’s music did not resonate with me at such a volume.

Any thoughts on this?