Popped! goes the Panda

It'll be a homecoming of sorts when Noah Lennox, the sonic conceptualist better known as Panda Bear and one of the chief creative forces in the highly influential, experimental indie band Animal Collective, plays the Popped! Music Festival this weekend with The Shins, The Hold Steady, Girl Talk, DJ ?uestlove, Yuck, Black Landlord, Cage the Elephant and Nikki Jean who also performs free at 1 p.m. Sunday at Main Street Music.

Lennox, 33, grew up just down I-95 in Baltimore, as did other members of Animal Collective. He now lives outside Lisbon, Portugal, which is where he talked over the phone about his newest solo album, Tomboy, earlier this week. But long before Lennox blew the collective mind of the indie nation with Panda Bear's trippy, sample-heavy disk Person Pitch in 2007 - named the ninth best album of the 2000s by agenda-setting online music magazine Pitchfork - he attended the arts-oriented Kimberton Waldorf School outside Phoenixville in Chester County.

Popped! comes to the Liacouras Center with a buzzed-about lineup of punks Titus Andronicus, retro-popsters Cults, and revered rapper Rakim performing Friday and Saturday. The venue was changed from FDR Park this week after fears that rain would wash away fans. A revised lineup is posted at http://poppedphiladelphia.com/schedule/

On Friday night, the show opens with The Shins, an indie rock band from Albuquerque, N.M. Lennox's Panda Bear will perform with Peter Kember, who did the reverb-laden mixes on Tomboy, which arrived in April in the wake of Person Pitch, and the Animal Collective's album Merriweather Post Pavilion, which was widely praised when released in 2009.

The first song on Tomboy, "You Can Count on Me," captures Lennox giving himself an echoey pep talk, drenched in Beach-Boys-inspired, multitracked harmony, as he repeatedly sings, "Know you can count on me," which could easily be misheard as "No, you can't count on me."

"I started off writing that song as more of an affirmative kind of thing," Lennox says. "But without realizing it, it came full circle and became more ambiguous. The negative fear of whether I was going to come through in the clutch is there in the song."

Recording Tomboy was fraught with tension, he says, after "totally surprising" accolades were heaped on Person Pitch.

When he made that album, Lennox says, "I was moving to a new country, I'd just met this new person" - his wife, fashion designer Fernanda Pereira - "and we were going to have a kid. There was just a lot happening for me at the time, all of which was positive. Also, I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing. . . . I was really just trying to have as much fun as I could making this music."

For Lennox, "Animal Collective was the job, and still is, and I don't mean that in a bad way."

Earlier this year, Lennox returned to Baltimore to work with his band mates Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Deakin (Josh Dibb) for the band's 12th album, a likely 2012 release. That album will continue the A.C. tradition of "the band competing with itself at all times," Lennox says. "We don't want to feel like we ever make a record that's a letdown."

As an expatriate, he's always aware "that I'll never be like everybody else," which is not a problem, since "I've been a lone-wolf person most of my life."

But while he has always conceived of solo albums as "this fun, on-the-side thing," this time, "it was much more cerebral. It was more of a battle in my mind. And I feel that represents itself in the music, as a sort of counterpoint to Person Pitch."

Rather than fill up the sonic palette with samples, on Tomboy, Lennox relied more on his own voice and guitar, processed into sumptuously melodic layers.

Songs like "Last Night at the Jetty" and "Surfer's Hymn" wash over the listener in postmodern Brian Wilson meld, with much tighter structures than lengthy Person Pitch excursions like "Bros."

"This time, rather than have a 12-minute track and just let it ride out and surf on the wave of the songs, I wanted to condense everything down to three-minute nuggets."

At Popped!, which is the first date of a six-show American tour, Lennox plans to play Tomboy in its entirety, with a few old songs thrown in.

When it comes to live performance, PB concedes that "I'm a lot more comfortable in the studio" than on stage.

"But there are things you can experience live that you can't get anywhere else," he says. "You can get to these really ecstatic places if things are going right. There's a feeling of everybody in the room going through this together. That can be really powerful."

Liacouras Center,

1776 N. Broad St.

Tickets: $59.50 for single-day advance, $65 day of show, $110 for two-day passes.

Information: 800-745-3000, 866-448-7849, http://poppedphila

delphia.com.

Partial Lineup

Schedule subject to update.

Friday (Doors open

at 2:30 p.m.) The Shins, Cage the Elephant, Panda Bear, Elbow, The Hold Steady, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Company of Thieves, Yuck, Miniature Tigers, Dead Confederate, Kurt Braunholer, Doogie Horner, John McKeever, and Alex Grubard.

Saturday (Doors open

at 10:30 a.m.) Pretty Lights, Girl Talk, Foster the People, Rakim, Cults, Kreayshawn,

Titus Andronicus, DJ ?UESTLOVE, Nikki Jean, Sun Airway, The Budos Band, Patty Crash, Charles Bradley,

Mates of State, Zee Avi, Black Landlord, Anamanaguchi, ASAP Rocky, Seth Herzog, Craig Baldo and Greg Barris.

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VIDEO: Critic Dan DeLuca talks with Nikki Jean;

then she and her band perform at Range Recording Studios: www.philly.com/nikkijeanEndText

at 215-854-5628, deluca@phillynews.com,

or @delucadan on Twitter.

Read his blog, "In the Mix,"