I don't know that I'd call Bloody Panda's Pheromone "demanding," just because I am a little suspicious of what that word means when it's deployed in a music-crit context: does it or does it not mean "you're not going to enjoy this"? Which would be a lie in the present case: few experiences are more immediately rewarding than getting to the last third of Pheromone, and reaching the point at which its vocabulary becomes mine. There's a period of resistance through the first track, kind of like the first five or ten minutes of a lot of free jazz shows, where (say) Vandermark blows staccato placekeeper notes through his mouthpiece in order to find the zone. It's both a lull-you-in strategy and an admission that the process is necessary on either side of the fourth wall. By the end of Pheromone I feel as if I've been floating in the ocean, the tide going out at the same time as the storm-clouds were gathering. Its climax, which occurs over a mournful eight minutes or so, is like the baby-carriage in Battleship Potemkin running on a slo-mo loop.

So I start the album over. What else am I to do? And then the first song (I suspect that song titles are something of a formality with Bloody Panda, but for the record, the first song here is called "Untitled") reveals itself a little more: the quieter section around the three-minute mark rises airily above the din, and the clean entrance of the bass and some wind-y instrument midway through seem more momentous.

There are all kinds of rote catalogue descriptions for a record like this: "repays repeated listening," "a grower," and a variety of synonyms for "complex." I don't know about all that; it seems like there's a very particular thing at work on Pheromone, a sort of secret style of prayer. "Complex" need not mean "unduly eggheaded." Here, let it mean "bigger than it looks at first." Do look as closely as you can.