The Animal Collective - four friends who like to get together to play music and watch movies and play football – have a sprawl of side projects and off-shoots which seem to expand daily, and attracts like-minded types such as Vashti Bunyan. Panda Bear is chiefly the work of Noah Lennox and chum Scott Mou; however Noah is the significant force here, with Person Pitch – his third album - showing the developments of growing up, becoming both a husband and father as well as de-camping to Lisbon, Portugal.

Almost a song cycle, albeit one that encompasses folk, Kylie, Cat Stevens, dub reggae and ice cream vans, Person Pitch reverberates around your head like channelling an ecclesiastical ecstasy while dressed as a woolly, free wanderer in a tribal head-dress serenading the great gods with their saints and symbols while ejaculating colossal harmonic hallucinations.

Sounds a bit hippy? Oh yes, but like the most rapturous moments of Spiritualized, Mercury Rev or Flaming Lips, there’s a dream-like quality that sends you weightless with joy. It’s what you thought the Polyphonic Spree would actually sound like. A daydream trapped in an amorphous bubble of crystal aspic. Believe me – tracks such as wide-eyed opener ‘'Comfy In Nautica'’, ‘'Take Pills'’ and the 12 minute-odd odyssey that is '‘Good Girl/Carrots'’ are just too good to be ignored.

Person Pitch sounds like the Beach Boys hosting a Hare Krishna-themed underwater music workshop. With whooshing noises, ecstatic screaming, tribal drumming, celestial chimes and eastern elements all enveloping towards a free and beautiful noise. In outer space.

Person Pitch is an album that could soundtrack all the amazing moments in one’s life, imbued with the glory of being alive; of birth and death and celebration, this is the sound you could live on and with forever. Like running naked through soup or swimming in flowers, the cool side of the pillow or cooing at the sweet wonder of baby animals. It’s an album that renews your faith in music and allows the inner child to run a glorious riot. And the cover’s gorgeous too.

Dreamers - you may have just found your album of the year. Astounding.