Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
- Written by Greg Salter
Bookending Gold Panda’s long awaited debut album Lucky Shiner are two versions of the same song. Anyone’s who’s been following his progress over the last few months will be familiar with the first version of ‘You’ – on the album, the track emerges from the sound of a tape being loaded into a cassette player. The affirming ‘You/and/me’ clipped, pitch-shifted vocals play out over drones and shifting samples – it sounds like a heady mix of the sweet and the sad; of living in the moment and also looking back at that moment, through the haze of memory. The second version is more mournful and reflective, only kicking into gear when the long ‘You’ vocal sample arrives. In between, Gold Panda takes you on a journey, through real and imagined places – but significantly and symbolically, it begins and ends with ‘You’.
Ahead of Lucky Shiner’s release, it’s been difficult to predict what kind of album Gold Panda – only going as Derwin behind his moniker for the moment – would produce, such is the range of styles and genres he’s incorporated into his music already. Arguably, he only began to settle into his current blend of fractured beats and evocative samples with last year’s ‘Quitter’s Raga’ single – his Before EP from the same year felt like a collection of experiments. With Lucky Shiner, all his ideas and influences come together into a kind of collage – things don’t always seem to flow or fit from song to song, but it sounds like that isn’t necessarily Gold Panda’s aim.
So you get the mix of hip-hop and sitar on ‘Same Dream Chine’ falling into the kind of crystallised dubstep of ‘Snow and Taxis’, or the way the warm, sudden beats on ‘Vanilla Minus’ wake you from the initial daydream of ‘You’ at the beginning of the record. As a whole then, the album feels like a bit of a patchwork – there’s such a range of influences and sounds here that you’ll as easily hear something that’ll make your ears prick up, before another fades into the background.
Fortunately, there are far more positive moments here than disappointing ones – the stuttering, restlessly happy ‘Before We Talked’ is one standout, while ‘Marriage’ is blissful, sounding like Aphex Twin if he gave up scaring children and old ladies and, well, got married. One of Gold Panda’s strengths though is that he keeps moving; his musical range is so broad that the minute you reach for a familiar artist to make a comparison, to ground you – J Dilla or Daedelus, for example – he turns the tables. The nearest comparison I can make is with Will Wiesenfeld as Baths – his Cerulean album also successfully combines a range of influences in a way that makes him refreshingly difficult to classify.
The result is an album that can be as moving and evocative as it is disorienting. Lucky Shiner can sound like an avalanche of found sounds, chaotically clipped and processed together, or it can open out into more open spaces. Without vocals, Gold Panda relies on sounds, beats and samples to convey emotion, and for the most part succeeds. It is difficult to pin down, which can put off casual listeners but arguably this is a strength. The wisest thing is just to sit back and take in the journey through one man’s quite personal musical landscape, knowing that, on this evidence, there’s still plenty of ground left for him to cover.